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I 



Religious Experience 

Exemplified in the Lives of 
Illustrious Christians 



BY 

JAMES MUDGE 



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Cincinnati: JENNINGS AND GRAHAM 
New York: EATON AND MAINS 



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Copyright, 19 13, by 
Jennings and Graham 



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^ Contents 

^1^ PAGE 

Wilbur Fisk, ----- 9 

Adoniram Judson, . - - 14 

Amos Lawrence, - - - - 20 

Stephen Olin, - - . - 29 

Horace Bushnell, - - - - 35 

F. W. Robertson, - - - 41 

Phillips Brooks, - - - - 47 

W. E. Gladstone, - - - 55 

C. G. Finney, 62 

Frances Ridley Havergal, - 68 

C. G. Gordon, - - - - 77 
Alfred Cookman, - - - 85 
Henry Drummond, - - - - 91 

D. L. Moody, - - - . loo 
George Mueller, - - - - 110 
Catherine Booth, - - - 119 



Introduction 

OF great significance is the fact that the 
most precious part of the Christian 
Scriptures is a biography, the life of the 
Master; and next to that comes the life 
and letters of St. Paul. It is also a fact 
that the influences most potent in every 
life are the lives of others. Vast is the force 
of example. Compared with it abstract 
reasonings or philosophical discussions have 
little weight. Hence the importance of a 
book like this, which presents in vivid con- 
crete forms the best religious experiences of 
a select number of the best minds. 

Those whose experiences are here set 
forth were all people of eminence, whose 
achievements in the world have been very 
marked, and whose words, therefore, carry 
the more weight in that they must be sup- 
posed to know what they are talking about. 
They were all not only good, but good for 
something, and give the lie to the frequent 
sneer, born of ignorance and prejudice, 
that people who are extremely pious are 
not practical or efficient or philanthropic. 
5 



INTRODUCTION 

The subjects of the following sketches 
were of the most diverse opinions and the 
most varied callings, as well as of quite 
opposite temperaments. This should by 
no means be overlooked. God makes His 
saints out of all kinds of materials, and on 
no one pattern. The sixteen here de- 
scribed belonged to ten or eleven denomi- 
nations. Three were Methodist Episcopa- 
lians, three were of the Church of England, 
two Congregationalists, one was a Protes- 
tant Episcopalian, one a Baptist, one a 
Unitarian, one an English Presbyterian, 
one a Scotch Presbyterian, one an American 
Presbyterian, one belonged to the Salva- 
tion Army, and one might be called a 
Lutheran, since he was thus brought up. 
Among them are ministers, evangelists, ed- 
ucators, bishops, together with one states- 
man, one soldier, one merchant, one mis- 
sionary, and one general philanthropist. 
All are taken from the Protestant Churches 
of the nineteenth century, and hence appeal 
to us more directly, more forcibly than 
could the saints of the Roman Catholic 
communion, or those produced by Protes- 
tantism in previous centuries. 

Amid the differences which will be 
6 



INTRODUCTION 

noted, or Inferred, as to intellectual views, 
denominational affiliations, secular voca- 
tions, and external circumstances, there is 
a significant sameness at one point. All 
have a passionate devotion to the will di- 
vine and account that religion finds its 
highest development or attainment, its 
chief manifestation, in oneness with God's 
good pleasure. All agree on this. And all 
have hearts glowing with love to Jesus. 
The essentials of true religion, after all, are 
few and simple. Minor matters may well 
be laid aside in the interest of greater con- 
centration on the one thing needful, the 
welcoming of the will of God in whatever 
shape it presents itself from moment to 
moment. He who has learned to do this 
promptly and heartily has mastered the 
secret of the highest, happiest life. 

James Mudge. 
Maiden, Massachusetts. 



Religious Experience 



Wilbur Fisk 

WILBUR FISK (1792-1839)— born at 
Brattleboro, Vt., converted in his 
eleventh year, graduated at Brown in 1815, 
first principal of Wesleyan Academy (1825), 
first president of Wesleyan University 
(1831), elected bishop of the Canada Con- 
ference in 1828, and of the Methodist 
Episcopal Church in 1836, but declining 
both because he felt that his call was edu- 
cational rather than administrative — was 
a man of intrinsic greatness, of the highest 
style of Christian character, of rare pulpit 
eloquence, full of grace, dignity, and power, 
the idol of the whole Church, South as well 
as North. But his life would have been 
altogether different from what it was, ex- 
cept for that which came to him at Well- 
fleet Camp Meeting, August 13, 1819. 

He was then pastor at Charlestown, 
Mass. His mind had been deeply wrought 
upon in regard to the subject of holiness 
9 



RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 

before going to the camp. Much was said 
about it there, and a sermon by Timothy 
Merritt on the baptism of the Holy Spirit 
strongly arrested his attention. He sought 
earnestly, with much prayer and no little 
struggle amounting to anguish, for fullness 
of love and victory over all sin. It was in 
Father Taylor's tent, Thursday morning, 
that deliverance came. Souls were being 
converted. '*We rose to sing,'' writes Mr. 
Fisk: *'I looked up to God, thanked Him 
for hearing prayer, and cried, *Lord, why 
not hear prayer for my soul? ' My strength 
began to fail me while I looked in faith. 
Xome, Lord, and come now. Thou wilt 
come. Heaven opens, my Savior smiles. 
O glory to God! Help me, my brethren, to 
praise the Lord.' The scene that was now 
open to my view I can never describe. I 
could say, *Lord, thou knowest that I 
love Thee above everything.' I was 
humbled in the dust that God should so 
bless such an undeserving soul." 

The Rev. Jotham Horton, who was 
present, writes: '*The habits of philo- 
sophical investigation, which Mr. Fisk's 
previous education had induced, made him 
exceedingly careful, lest the fruits of im- 
10 



WILBUR FISK 

agination under high devotional feeling or 
the effervescence of strong religious excite- 
ment should be substituted for the sancti- 
fying influence of the Holy Ghost. He had 
just been engaged in vocal prayer, and one 
sentiment which he had devoutly expressed 
was that no influence save that of the Holy 
Spirit might give character to the devotion 
in which they were engaged. He was in 
the very act of guarding against strange 
fires and supplicating a holy baptism when, 
so overwhelming were the manifestations 
of the power of God, that he sank to the 
ground. When he had so far recovered his 
physical strength as to be taken to his own 
tent, there was held another season of holy 
communion. Being unable to stand, he 
was supported by ministerial brethren. 
His language and whole appearance had 
something in them more than human, in- 
dicating that his soul then glowed with 
ardors of love allied to those of the angels." 
Mr. Merritt, looking on, remarked, "I 
never saw the power of God so displayed 
on earth.'* From this meeting Mr. Fisk 
dated his experience of perfect love. 
*'God was pleased," he wrote a few days 
afterward to his sister, '*to empty my soul 
11 



RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 

of sin and fill it with love in the same 
moment." 

His biographer, Dr. Prentice, says: '*It 
is certain that the marvelous scenes at 
Wellfleet made a permanent change in 
Fisk's religious life. Before that he had 
passed through seasons when he doubted 
the fact of his acceptance with God, his 
personal interest in Christ, and even the 
truth of Christianity itself. He was de- 
livered from such things forever at Well- 
fleet. From this time forth he never 
changed his estimate of the nature of the 
work of grace wrought in his soul at the 
camp meeting, nor was there anything in 
his spirit or speech or conduct, public or 
private, which ever led men associated with 
him to think his conception of that work a 
mistaken one. On the contrary, the testi- 
mony of all his associates, in the various 
positions he filled, was uniform and out- 
spoken that he did live up even to the high 
standard he professed." Dr. Holdich, long 
associated with him at the university, 
writes: **From this time he has been 
heard to say that he never laid his head 
upon the pillow at night without feeling 
that if he never waked in this world, all 
12 



WILBUR FISK 

would be well. Prior to this he was often 
subject to desponding, gloomy seasons. 
We heard him say long afterwards that he 
knew no gloomy hours; his mind was al- 
ways serene and happy." 

Dr. Abel Stevens speaks of him as 
having a perfect moral character, so that 
his most intimate friends were unable to 
mention one defect that marred the beauty 
of his nature. '^He lived for many years 
in the faith and exemplification of St. 
Paul's subUme doctrine of Christian per- 
fection. He prized that great tenet as one 
of the most important distinctions of 
Christianity. His own experience respect- 
ing it was marked by signal circumstances, 
and from the day that he practically 
adopted it till he triumphed over death, its 
impress was radiant on his daily life. 
With John Wesley, he deemed this im- 
portant truth to be one of the most solemn 
responsibilities of his Church, the most 
potent element in the experimental divinity 
of the Scriptures.** 



13 



Adoniram Juclson 

JUDSON was born at Maiden, Mass., 
August 9, 1788 (his father being a min- 
ister, settled there), graduated valedicto- 
rian at Brown University 1807; sailed for 
India, February 19, 1812; arrived at Ran- 
goon, July 13, 1813 ; suffered cruel imprison- 
ment at Ava, 1825; visited America for his 
health, 1845; died at sea April 12, 1850. 
His conversion took place at the An- 
dover Theological Seminary in 1807. While 
not attended with overpowering exercises, 
and rather gradual than sudden, it pro- 
duced a very marked change in him, and 
he never had occasion to doubt its deep 
reality. His call to the mission field was 
somewhat similar. It culminated in Feb- 
ruary, 1810. To please God was hence- 
forth his main purpose, and it eventually 
became his only one. In tracing the course 
of his experience we are impressed by noth- 
ing more distinctly than by his intense love 
of pre-eminence, his determination every- 
where to be first, and to reach perfection 
14 



ADONIRAM JUDSON 

at all possible points. From early youth 
to latest age this stamped his character 
and gave direction to his endeavors. He 
had powers that would have carried him 
to the front and made him illustrious in 
any calling. He was endowed with a will 
of the very highest order, and had a spirit 
of indomitable perseverance. From the be- 
ginning he gave himself with the greatest 
earnestness to the subjecting everything 
within him to the obedience of Christ. His 
first wife, after living with him eleven 
years, wrote: *'I feel that there is not a 
better man on the globe than my husband, 
not one who labors more strenuously to 
overcome every unhallowed emotion of his 
spirit.'* There was a great deal in his 
natural disposition that needed to be over- 
come, and eager as he was to excel, with 
the loftiest conception of what a Christian 
ought to be, he could not rest content with 
any ordinary attainments or be satisfied 
while aught remained susceptible of im- 
provement. He left no stone unturned to 
achieve the results which seemed to him of 
highest worth. 

The rules and regulations which from 
time to time he adopted in his earnest striv- 
15 



RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 

ing after personal holinesa were very many. 
We append a few of them: ** Whatever 
others do, let my life be a life of prayer; 
observe three seasons of secret prayer every 
day — morning, noon, and night; live under 
a constant sense of the presence of God; 
deny self at every turn so far as consistent 
with life, health, and usefulness; learn to 
distinguish and obey the internal impulses 
of the Holy Spirit; keep turning the soul 
to God until it habitually rests in God; 
do nothing from your own will, but all 
from the will of God; see the hand of God 
in all events, and thereby become recon- 
ciled to His dispensations; have the Scrip- 
ture and some devotional book in constant 
reading; be sweet in temper, voice, and 
word, to please the ever-present Lord." 
He deeply felt, as he writes to a friend, 
'^the comparative insignificance of all 
human accomplishments, and the over- 
whelming importance of spiritual graces, 
the habitual enjoyment of closet religion, 
a soul abstracted from the world and much 
occupied in the contemplation of heavenly 
glories.'* 

Some of the extreme methods which 
he used for the complete crucifixion of self 
16 



ADONIRAM JUDSON 

have not commended themselves to all his 
admirers. We are not called to imitate 
him at all points. What is to be unre- 
servedly commended in Judson is the de- 
termination which he showed to stick at 
nothing that seemed to him, in his condi- 
tion, requisite to make himself perfectly 
pleasing in the sight of God. We are not 
authorized to say that he should have 
done otherwise, or could have done less. 
We are warranted in declaring that the 
end he sought was right and every way 
worthy of largest sacrifice. He was thor- 
oughly in earnest. He set about waging a 
war of extermination against pride and 
selfishness in all their forms, tracing them 
to their last retreats, getting rid of them 
altogether, and reaching oneness with the 
Divine. Whether he reached all that he 
wished or not, the effect of the measures 
he took seems to have been good. For the 
rest of his life he was marked by a loving 
trust in God under the most discouraging 
circumstances, and by a supremely disin- 
terested devotedness which he had not 
known before, and which is very rarely 
seen anywhere. 

He was greatly indebted for spiritual 
2 17 



RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 

counsel to Madame Guyon's works, Kemp- 
is's ''Imitation of Christ," William Law's 
''Christian Perfection," and the "Life of 
Payson." It was soon after being helped 
by them that he wrote to a brother mis- 
sionary: "The land of Beulah lies beyond 
the valley of the shadow of death. Many 
Christians spend all their days in a con- 
tinual bustle doing good. They are too 
busy to find either the valley or Beulah. 
Let us die as soon as possible, and by what- 
ever path God shall appoint. And when 
we are dead to the world and nature and 
self, we shall begin to live to God." 

The very lust for "finishing," which he 
speaks of as "one of his failings," which 
enabled him to carry on to completion his 
marvelously perfect translation of the 
Bible into Burmese, made it impossible for 
him to stop short of any attainable achieve- 
ment in piety. Improvement went on to 
the last, as he steadily cleansed himself of 
every remaining defilement of flesh or 
spirit. Mrs. Emily Judson testifies as to 
his closing days: "He had been, from my 
first acquaintance with him, an uncom- 
monly spiritual Christian, exhibiting his 
richest graces in the unguarded intercourse 
18 



ADONIRAM JUDSON 

of private life. But during his last years 
it seemed as though the light of the world 
on which he was entering had been sent to 
brighten his upward pathway. Every sub- 
ject on which he conversed, every book we 
read, every incident that occurred, whether 
trivial or important, had a tendency to 
suggest some peculiarly spiritual train of 
thought, till it seemed to me that more 
than ever before Christ was all his theme.*' 
**0, the love of Christ!" was a frequent 
exclamation in his last illness. ^' Peace '* 
and "Victory'' were words much on his 
lips. '*I am not tired of my work," he 
said, '* neither am I tired of the world, yet 
when Christ calls me home I shall go with 
the gladness of a boy bounding away from 
his school." It was thus he went, with no 
uncertainty as to the future. His life had 
been spent wholly for Jesus, or as nearly 
so as falls to the lot of mortals, and his 
acceptance of God's will in all its ramifica- 
tions had been marvelously complete, and 
both by the extent of his labors and the 
purity of his purpose he had fully deserved 
the hearty ''Well done," which we are en- 
tirely certain he received. 



19 



Amos Lawrence 

HIS home for the first twenty-one years 
was at Groton, Mass., where he was 
born of unadulterated Puritan stock, April 
22, 1786. Only one incident of note oc- 
curred during these years. As clerk in a 
general country store, where, according to 
the custom of that period, large quantities 
of intoxicants were sold and drunk, he was 
exposed to severe temptation. He speedily 
made up his mind and resolutely took a 
stand, remarkable for that day, from which 
he never thenceforward for a moment de- 
parted, a stand of total abstinence not only 
from liquor, but from all forms of tobacco. 
Many years afterward he said, '*To this 
simple fact of starting just right I am in- 
debted, with God's blessing on my labors, 
for my present position." 

December 17, 1807, he commenced bus- 
iness in Boston, without a dollar; and for 
the next twenty-four years gave himself 
assiduously to his duties as head of a house 
of importers which speedily became one of 
20 



AMOS LAWRENCE 

the most flourishing in the city. It was 
just about this time, when he was less than 
twenty- two, that he wrote to his sister as 
follows: ''Many, when speaking of per- 
fection, say it is not attainable, or hitherto 
unattainable, and it is therefore vain to 
try or hope for it. To such I would ob- 
serve that, from motives of duty to our 
Creator and ambition in ourselves, we 
ought to strive for it, at least so far as not 
to be distanced by those who have pre- 
ceded us." That he did earnestly strive 
for it, and with a wonderful degree of suc- 
cess, his subsequent years bear witness. 
He had an exceedingly high standard, both 
in temporal and spiritual affairs, ''a stand- 
ard of action,'* as he himself says in writing 
to his brother, **so high as to require great 
vigilance in living up to it.'* Sterling 
honesty stamped every transaction, to- 
gether with the strictest sense of justice. 
He was unwilling to turn to his own ad- 
vantage the ignorance or misfortune of 
others; he stooped to no artifice or deceits; 
he commanded universal confidence as a 
man of the most unbending integrity on 
which no spot or blemish ever rested. 
His moral perceptions and sensibilities were 
21 



RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 

of the keenest, and it is asserted, with good 
reason,, that he never deviated a hair's 
breadth from what he felt to be his duty. 
It was this that constituted the strength of 
his character, his supreme reverence for 
the right and his unfaltering pursuit of it. 
His business became very extensive, so 
much so that he found it, as he says, 
** occupying his thoughts to a degree en- 
tirely disproportioned to its importance." 
He found, he writes January 1, 1826, 
**that communion which ought ever to be 
kept free between man and his Maker in- 
terrupted by the incessant calls of the 
multifarious affairs of our establishment.'' 
He terms it ''the extreme of folly'' to ac- 
quire property at such a sacrifice of the 
highest interests, and promptly made ar- 
rangements to diminish his burdens. His 
responsibilities to God were ever kept 
uppermost, and the account to be rendered 
at last was never lost sight of. 

The third period of his life began June 
1, 1831, and extended till his departure 
from earth December 31, 1852. In the full 
tide of a most successful career as one of 
the leading millowners and commission 
merchants of the country, he was suddenly 
22 



AMOS LAWRENCE 

stricken down by a stomach trouble which 
left him an invalid for the rest of his days, 
days which were prolonged only by the 
most rigid watchfulness, especially in the 
matter of diet, in which he exercised al- 
most inconceivable abstinence, sitting down 
at no meal with his family, weighing every 
particle of solid or liquid food. He bore 
this deep affliction in the most beautiful 
manner, even as he had done a previous 
test. (At the death of his beloved wife, 
whose removal blasted his dearest earthly 
hopes, January 14, 1819, he writes: ''But 
God reigns; let us rejoice.'') January 1, 
1832, confined to his sick-room, he writes: 
''I can see nothing but the unbounded 
goodness of our Heavenly Father and best 
Friend in all that has been taken from me, 
as well as in all that is left to me. I can 
say with sincerity that I never have had 
so much to call forth my warmest and 
deepest gratitude for favors bestowed as at 
the present time. Among my sources of 
happiness is the settled conviction that, in 
chastening His children, God desires their 
good; and if His chastenments are thus 
viewed, we can regard them in no other 
light than as manifestations of His fatherly 
23 



RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 

care and kindness. We are placed here to 
be disciplined for another and higher state, 
and whatever happens to us makes a part 
of that discipline/^ He was more than 
contented. Writing December 23, 1833, 
he says: ^*The situation which I occupy is 
one that I would not exchange, if I had the 
power, with any man living/' In 1838 he 
says: *'I am the happiest man living, and 
yet would willingly exchange worlds this 
day, if it be the good pleasure of our good 
Friend and Father in heaven. I can see 
the good hand of God in all my experiences 
for thirty years.'' 

In these twenty-one years, during which 
his peculiar illness entirely incapacitated 
him for active business life, he gave what- 
ever time and strength he could command 
to a philanthropic career which has had 
few, if any, parallels. Previous to this his 
charities had begun to be systematic and 
munificent, as his increasing wealth per- 
mitted, but now they took on a yet more 
thorough-going character. In the fullest 
sense of the term, he lived for others. It 
was truly said of him, ** Every day of his 
life was a blessing to somebody." He 
loved his ^'neighbor," and under that term 
24 



AMOS LAWRENCE 

took in the whole human family. Two 
rooms in his house, and sometimes three, 
were used mainly to receive useful articles 
for distribution. He selected and carried 
out or sent out, far and near, innumerable 
packages carefully adapted to the wants of 
the recipients, whether those wants were 
in the line of food, clothing, books, money, 
or other tokens of affection. He scattered 
vast quantities of the publications of the 
American Tract Society and the Sunday 
School Union. He became very much in- 
terested in Williams College, and gave to 
it, unsolicited, large sums in most timely 
ways, more than any one else had done up 
to that day. In his letters to President 
Hopldns, he expresses deep concern for the 
salvation of the souls of the students, 
praying God to perfect the good work which 
he rejoices to hear has begun. The Theo- 
logical School at Bangor was also one of 
the objects of his bounty. He made at 
least ten persons life directors of the Amer- 
ican Bible Society by the payment of $150 
for each. The completion of the Bunker 
Hill Monument was largely his work. 
These are but specimens of the things he 
was constantly doing. It is calculated that 
25 



RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 

he gave away during his lifetime for the 
benefit of his fellow-men not less than 
$700,000 — gave it with personal attention 
and sympathy, gave it as a Christian man, 
from a sense of divine obligation and a 
deep feeling of the duties of stewardship. 
Probably no one up to that time had given 
as much while living. He never felt at 
liberty to waste on himself what could be 
beneficially applied to the good of those 
around him. 

He was by faith a Unitarian of the old 
school, a constant attendant and faithful 
communicant in the Brattle Street Church. 
His pastor, Dr. Lothrop, speaks of his 
''profound reverence for the sacred Scrip- 
tures and the divine authority of Jesus 
Christ. He believed in Christ as the 
Messiah and Savior of the world, and there- 
fore found peace and strength to his soul 
amid all the perils and duties and sorrows 
of life.'' He loved to listen at church to 
those who did not shun to declare the whole 
counsel of God, and would express disap- 
pointment when the preacher failed to em- 
phasize the important truths of the gospel. 
He had a dread of the German rationalism 
which he saw creeping in, and rejoiced 
26 



AMOS LAWRENCE 

when, as he writes, '^deep feelings of sin 
and salvation through the Beloved are 
awakened." He counted himself "a dis- 
ciple and follower of Christ the Beloved,'' 
and says, ''I will not quarrel with a man's 
Presbyterian, Episcopal, or Baptist creed, 
so be he will act the part of a good soldier 
of Jesus Christ; for I verily believe great 
multitudes of all Christians desire to serve 
Him faithfully. I have no hope in isms, 
but have a strong hope in the cross of 
Christ." At his funeral officiated three of 
his most intimxate and valued friends, rep- 
resenting three different denominations — 
Dr. Lothrop, Dr. Hopkins, and Dr. Sharp, 
pastor of the Charles Street Baptist Church 
His spirit was of the largest and most 
catholic sort. Religion was everything to 
him. He was a man of habitual prayer, a 
loving disciple who breathed very much of 
the spirit of the Master, with a firm faith 
in Providence and an abiding trust in the 
loving-kindness of the Father. He held 
family prayers morning and evening. There 
do not seem to have been any special crises 
in his religious experience. His character 
was rather a gradual development from 
the germs planted deep within far back in 
27 



RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 

the years of childhood by the devout hands 
of godly parents. One of his letters con- 
tains this sentence: ''He indeed is rich in 
grace whose graces are not hindered by 
his riches/' This is most true. Tried by 
this test, Amos Lawrence was rich in 
grace. His example will speak, we trust, 
to some who would be less impressed by 
the piety of those who are poorer in this 
world's wealth or less occupied with earthly 
care. 



28 



Stephen Olin 



THE place of Stephen Olin in the history 
of American Methodism is a very high 
one. Dr. Abel Stevens calls him ''the 
most intrinsically great man that American 
Methodism has produced/' adding, ''So 
manifest and commanding were his traits 
that this pre-eminence can be awarded 
him without the slightest invidiousness." 
Born in Vermont, March 2, 1797, he grad- 
uated, with the valedictory oration, at 
Middlebury College in 1820, but on ac- 
count of his health he speedily repaired to 
Abbeville, S. C, to teach in an academy. 
Here, September 20, 1821, he was con- 
verted, and soon felt a call to the ministry. 
After three years of teaching, he joined the 
South Carolina Conference in January, 
1824, and was appointed to Charleston. 
In July, 1826, he was elected professor of 
Belles Lettres in Franklin College, Athens, 
Georgia, retaining this position for seven 
years. At the beginning of 1834 he be- 
came president of Randolph-Macon Col- 
29 



RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 

lege, Virginia. The last nine years of his 
life (he passed away in 1851) were spent 
most brilliantly as president of the Wes- 
leyan University in Middletown, Conn. 

His conversion, as noted above, did not 
take place until he was twenty-four, for he 
had been skeptical in youth, and planned 
to be a lawyer, like his father. When God 
spoke peace to his soul, alone in the woods, 
there was a mighty change; a most thor- 
ough work was done, a passing as from 
hell to heaven in the twinkling of an eye. 
Rebellion was all gone in a moment, as 
Jesus was embraced with all his mind and 
heart. ''Lord, what wilt Thou have me 
to do?" was his instant cry, and he gave 
himself to God's work with entire devotion. 

His biographer speaks of ''four great 
landmarks of spiritual progress which he 
erected in his journal, with the deepest 
solemnity, and as in God's immediate 
presence.'* The first commemorated his 
conversion. The second, a fuller dedica- 
tion, on his birthday, March 2, 1840, when 
he began his perilous journey through the 
Sinaitic desert, and wrote in his journal, 
"This enterprise I especially commit to 
God, as I do myself, unreservedly for time 
30 



STEPHEN OLIN 

and eternity, through Jesus Christ/* The 
fourth was on the borders of death, when 
God granted him a special vision of the 
heavenhes. The third was in 1842, after 
returning from abroad, '*a good deal im- 
proved in spiritual things," as he says, 
''but strongly led by all that happened to 
him of affliction and deliverance to seek 
perfect confonnity to His will." He was 
enabled to realize it to a greater extent than 
ever before. He writes in his journal: 
*'I have endeavored to make a new and 
solemn offering of soul and body to Christ, 
and am earnestly seeking for the experience 
of perfect love, for all the fullness of God. 
I here enter my solemn vow that I will 
from this hour and through all my future 
life make God's will the sovereign rule of 
my actions. I perpetually present before 
Him in living sacrifice my body and soul, 
my life and health, my humble talents and 
attainments, my influence and time and 
property, to be used only as a trust for 
which I am strictly accountable. I humbly 
pray for grace to keep this solemn pledge, 
which I here record with great deliberation 
and under deep sense of its import." 

There is evidence to show that this 
31 



RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 



deeper dedication was fully accepted, and 
was productive of the best results. Writing 
soon after, he says: '*I never before ex- 
perienced such rest in Christ, such calm, 
unshaken faith, such ready, unswerving 
consent of the heart to the Divine will, 
such an utter surrender of my own will to 
God's. I can not find, after much prayerful 
examination, that I have any disposition 
to do or love anything that is not well 
pleasing in His sight. I write this with 
great self-distrust, but as the result of self- 
examination. I am happier than I ever 
was before. I find God present with me in 
a new sense. I rest in God. I am satis- 
fied with Him. His will is mine. Mine is 
swallowed up in His. Christ is my all in 
all. Bless His holy name!'* 

His biographer says: ''From this time 
the doctrine of full redemption was very 
precious to him, and he looked with painful 
feelings upon anything calculated to bring 
it into disrepute or lower the standard of 
piety which it implies." Dr. Stevens thus 
relates the substance of a conversation 
with him at Boston in 1845. '4 had," he 
remarked, ''difficulties regarding our theo- 
logical views of the doctrine of sanctifica- 
32 



STEPHEN OLIN 

tion. I even joined the Conference with 
exceptions to it. But I was admitted, the 
Conference expressing a hope that further 
inquiries would rectify my views. Years, 
however, passed without any modification 
of my opinions. But it pleased God to 
lead me on into the truth. My health 
failed. My official employments had to be 
abandoned. I lost my children, my wife 
died, and I was wandering over the world 
alone, with scarcely anything remaining 
but God. I lost my hold on all things else, 
and became, as it were, lost myself in God. 
My affections centered in Him. My will 
became absorbed in His. I sank, as it 
were, into the blessing of perfect love, and 
found in my own consciousness the reality 
of the doctrine which I had theoretically 
doubted.'' 

In 1843 we find him writing: "My 
feelings in matters of religion were always 
ardent and strong, but they have under- 
gone great changes within this last year or 
two. I am as far as possible from all 
austerity or any tendency to it, but I am 
greatly conscious of an engrossing wish 
and purpose to consecrate myself wholly 
to God. I greatly distrust myself and my 
3 33 



RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 

good resolutions, but not the grace of 
Christ. He will help. He will accept and 
bless/* In 1848 he writes to Dr. McClin- 
tock: '* Preach knowledge and holiness. 
We are fearfully in the background in 
both.'' In 1850 he says: ''My heart is 
fixed. 'Though He slay me, yet will I 
trust in Him.' 'Thy will be done.' These 
texts suit me. My long illnesses have mod- 
ified my religious experience. In past 
years I was filled with desire, an intense 
desire, for health to do God's work — to 
preach, to study, to be felt. But God did 
not need me. Now I am brought to entire 
resignation. The Lord will do what is 
best. My will is in harmony with His. I 
shall have a part with the blessed. The 
law of affinities will find place." 



34 



Horace Bushnell 

THIS great thinker and preacher fur- 
nishes a fine illustration of that deep 
saying by Benjamin M. Adams, *'The souls 
of men get on toward God, as a rule, by a 
series of crises/' When well on in years 
(1861), writing to his wife from Clifton 
Springs, he speaks of ** another great stage 
in my heart's life. I never saw so distinctly 
as now what it is to be a disciple, or what 
the keynote is of all most Christly experi- 
ence. I think, too, that I have made my 
last discovery in this mine. First, I was 
led along into initial experience of God, 
socially and by force of the blind religious 
instinct in my nature; secondly, I was ad- 
vanced into the clear moral light of Christ 
and of God, as related to the principle of 
rectitude; next, or thirdly, I was set on by 
the inward personal discovery of Christ, 
and of God as represented in him; now, 
fourthly, I lay hold of and appropriate the 
general culminating fact of God's vicarious 
character in goodness, and of mine to be 
35 



RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 



accomplished in Christ as a follower. My 
next stage of discovery will be when I drop 
the body and go home to be with Christ 
in the conscious openly revealed fellowship 
of a soul whose affinities are with him. I 
see now what it is to be a Christian as 
never before, and that in such a light as, 
I am sure, is hidden from too many of 
His followers.'* 

The first epoch here referred to, that 
which may be called his conversion, oc- 
curred at nineteen, when, he says, "the 
Lord, in His tender mercy, led me to Jesus.'* 
It was in the latter part of 1821 that he 
entered into covenant relations with God, 
joined the Church, and engaged for a time 
enthusiastically in religious work. But 
during his college course at Yale, (1823- 
27) and for a time after, while not falling 
into outward sin, he lost his hold on God, 
and became subject to very serious in- 
tellectual doubts which came near to wreck- 
ing him. They were brought to an end by 
a remarkable religious revival which pre- 
vailed during the winter of 1831 at Yale, 
where he was a most popular tutor. He 
was led to put his questionings aside as 
things that were not of the first importance. 
36 



HORACE BUSHNELL 

He yielded to the demands of the heart, 
the responsibiUties of Hfe, and the feeling 
that completest righteousness must be par- 
amount, and that other matters could wait, 
would indeed be settled in due time, if he 
went forward steadily, earnestly in the 
path of plain duty. 

The third crisis came in 1848. His 
wife calls it the central point in his life. 
It arrived somewhat gradually. It was 
prepared for by the death of his beloved 
little boy a few years previously, drawing 
his thoughts and affections to the spiritual 
and the unseen. He said a year or two 
after, *'I have learned more of experi- 
mental religion since my little boy died 
than in all my life before.'^ He became 
interested in the writings of Madame 
Guyon and Fenelon, and their interpreter, 
Prof. T. C. Upham. ''I believed," he 
said, *'that there is a higher and fuller life 
that can be lived, and set myself to attain 
it.** The great possibilities of real Chris- 
tianity unfolded themselves more and 
more to his conception as he studied the 
subject. On an early morning of February 
his wife awoke to hear that the light they 
had waited for more than they that watch 
37 



RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 

for the morning had arisen. She asked, 
"What have you seen?*' He repHed, 
**The gospel/* It came to him at last, 
after all his thought, not as something 
reasoned out, but as an inspiration, a rev- 
elation from the mind of God Himself. 
He immediately embodied his new experi- 
ence in a sermon from the text, ** Until 
Christ be formed in you/' "That he re- 
garded this as a crisis in his spiritual life," 
writes his wife, "is evident from his not 
infrequent reference to it among his Chris- 
tian friends. Even as late as 1871, when 
we were alone one evening, the conversa- 
tion led back to this familiar subject. In 
answer to a question, he said: *I seemed 
to pass a boundary. I had never been very 
legal in my Christian life, but now I passed 
from those partial seeings, glimpses, and 
doubts, into a clearer knowledge of God 
and into His inspirations, which I have 
never wholly lost. The change was into 
faith — a sense of the freeness of God and 
the ease of approach to Him. Faith I found 
to be not the committing of one's thought 
in assent to any proposition, but the trust- 
ing of one's being to a Being, there to be 
rested, kept, guided, molded, governed, 
38 



HORACE BUSHNELL 

and possessed forever. It gives you God, 
fills you with God in immediate experi- 
mental knowledge, puts you in possession 
of all there is in Him, and allows you to be 
invested with His character itself/ ** 

It was a very great change, as his wife 
testifies, making a new man of him, in- 
vesting him with a divine panoply, opening 
his whole being to the light, and giving to 
his relations with God the warmth and 
glow of personal friendship, enabling him 
to ** spiritually discern spiritual things." 

His soul-growth was constant as the 
years went on, especially during the final 
period when laid aside from more active 
labors and ripening for the better land. 
Here are some of his expressions: *^0 my 
God — ^what a fact to possess and know 
that He is ! I have not seemed to compare 
Him with anything, and set Him in higher 
value; but He has been the all and the 
altogether everywhere lovely. There is 
nothing else to compete; there is nothing 
else, in fact. What a wonder is God! 
What a glory for us to possess Him!" 
When the text, **The good and perfect and 
acceptable will of God," was repeated to 
him, he replied with emphasis: **Yes, and 
39 



RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 

accepted. I do nothing but simply talk 
with God, taking small draughts, but O 
how strong and sweet, from the good 
Word, singing a song of praise without 
sound! I give up my projects and my sub- 
jects and gather myself in to get my last 
lessons from God. And to this I am bend- 
ing with great hopefulness and refresh- 
ment. He is with me and I am with Him. 
It is good to look over and claim our in- 
heritance and get naturalized in feeling 
beforehand.^* 

Surely he was, for a good while before- 
hand, a fully naturalized citizen of the 
heavenly country. He found it very easy 
to go over where he had so long looked 
over. The shades of earth fled away and 
the morning of eternity broke for him 
very early, while the stars were still shining 
in the silent heavens, February 17, 1876, 
when he was within two months of com- 
pleting his seventy-fourth year. He had 
long been hidden in the secret of God's 
presence, and he went with exceeding joy 
to prove what the fullness of that presence 
might mean. 



40 



1 



Frederick W. Robertson 

FREDERICK WILLIAM ROBERT- 
SON, the great preacher of Brighton, 
whose early death at the age of thirty- 
seven, in 1853, left the world much poorer, 
owed not a little of his marvelous power 
in the pulpit to his profound Christian ex- 
perience and his insatiable desire to be 
altogether like Christ. Even as a boy he 
was extremely conscientious and sensitive 
in moral matters. His mother said of 
him, '*I never knew him to tell a lie.'' 
And he would rather have lost every prize 
at the academy than owe one to foreign 
help, or to the usual aid which boys seek 
from translations. **At Oxford,'* writes a 
friend, '*he carried the banner of the cross 
without fear, and was not ashamed of 
Christ in a place which offered more hin- 
drances than helps to a distinctly Christian 
profession." 

When fairly launched into the ministry 
(he was ordained July 12, 1840, at the age 
of twenty- four), he writes to a friend: 
41 



RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 

'* Every day convinces me more and more 
that there is one thing, and but one, on 
earth worth living for, and that is to do 
God's work and gradually grow in con- 
formity to His image by mortification and 
self-denial and prayer.'* Somewhat later 
he writes: ''Of one thing I have become 
distinctly conscious, that my motto for 
life, my whole heart's expression is, *None 
but Christ,' to have the mind of Christ, 
to feel as He felt, to judge the world and 
to estimate the world's maxims as He 
judged and estimated, that is the thing 
worth living for." For this he never 
ceased striving. He deeply felt that the 
surest way of arriving at correct views of 
any matter is to endeavor to enter into the 
mind of the Master and to obtain His 
point of view. Love for Jesus was the root 
of his life and the spring of all his effort. 
It was a conscious, personal, realized devo- 
tion. It colored and pervaded every 
thought; it was an unceasing presence 
with him. ''The love a Christian bears 
to his Redeemer," he once said, ''is a love 
more delicate far than was ever borne to 
sister, a reverence more sacred than was 
ever borne to mother, or the adoration 
42 



FREDERICK W. ROBERTSON 

with which he regards his God." The 
spirit of Christ saturated everything he 
said and did. Nothing is more visible in 
his letters than the intimate way in which, 
after a world of sudy, of reverent medita- 
tion and adoring contemplation, he en- 
tered into the human life of Christ. To 
that everything is referred, by that every- 
thing is explained. So there grew up in 
him a deep comprehension of the whole, 
as well as a minute sympathy with all the 
delicate details, of the character of Christ. 
He had much in his intense, excessively 
nervous and naturally irritable disposition, 
and the fierce excitement which his mental 
exertion produced, to struggle against, but 
he most emphatically ''fought a good 
fight." He strove hard and constantly for 
perfect self-control. He did not attempt 
to eradicate his natural qualities because 
they seemed bent toward evil, but rather 
tried to restrain and balance and exalt 
them by a higher motive. Nothing is 
finer than his quiet devotion to all small 
duties, his steadfast mastery over himself, 
his unwavering adherence to that course 
of teaching which brought upon him the 
censures and slanders which, however his 
43 



RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 



reason might despise them, stung his heart 
to the last. 

Strict self-denial was a habit with him; 
prayer was his constant resource; and he 
made very much of regular devotional 
reading. He specially prized, he says, ''the 
works of eminently holy persons whose tone 
was not merely uprightness of character 
and high-mindedness, but communion, a 
strong sense of personal and ever-living 
communion with God besides.'* He read 
much in such lives as those of Martyn and 
Brainerd. Writing at Brighton, near the 
close of his life, when the pressure was very 
great on him, he says: "I recollect how 
far more peaceful my mind used to be 
when I was in the regular habit of reading 
daily, with scrupulous adherence to a plan, 
books of a devotional description; high 
thoughts and aims and feelings are caught 
by contact with loftiest minds far more 
than by any didactic discourse.'* 

He clearly apprehended, as all who have 
reached the heights have done, the para- 
mount importance of the right attitude of 
the will. He exclaims: "To say, 'Thy 
will be done,' in every dispensation, be it 
what it may, is the whole of religion: for 
44 



FREDERICK W. ROBERTSON 

what have we to do but to have our wishes 
entirely merged in that of our Father? 
When this is done we are ripe for the 
garner. Voluntary acquiescence in, and 
working with, the manifested law or will 
of God, is the very essence of human good- 
ness. Is it not another name for love? " 

His life was as far as possible removed 
from being a smooth and easy one. His 
sufferings, both physical and mental, were 
at times excruciating. He was very lonely, 
as all must be who walk the high paths of 
truth-seeking and make Christ their model. 
He was bitterly persecuted by those who 
did not at all understand him. But none 
of these things moved him from the 
straight road. He had a most noble inde- 
pendence and the strength of mind which 
is indispensable for great goodness. He 
held that we are here not to enjoy, but to 
learn. He writes in a letter: ^^Pain has 
long ceased to be an unintelligible mystery 
to me. Agony and anguish — O, in these 
far more than in sunshine, I can read a 
meaning and believe in Infinite Love. 
Goodness is better than happiness; and if 
pain be the minister of goodness, I can see 
that it is a proof of Love to debar happi- 
45 



RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 



ness; nor am I moved from this conviction 
by exceptional cases, by perceiving that 
sometimes the result seems opposite. I 
am so certain that all is right that nothing 
of this kind, mental or physical, disturbs 
me. 

Yes, he had the faith and the love 
which proved sufficient even for his great 
needs. A popular preacher at a fashionable 
watering-place, he in no way deteriorated, 
never lowered his banner, never sought for 
admiration, lived for the lowliest, despised 
notoriety, shunned fame, hated shams of 
every kind, bravely bore reproach for 
Christ, fearlessly spoke the truth as God 
gave him to see it, was an inspiration to 
great multitudes while he breathed, and 
since his premature departure has helped, 
through his published sermons, to elevate 
millions into a better comprehension of the 
glories of salvation. He has an inalienable 
place among the few exalted spirits who 
have laid the world under a great debt by 
the things they said and by the life they 
lived. 



46 



1 




Phillips Brooks 

PHILLIPS BROOKS had every help 
that the best of ancestry could furnish. 
He came of the strongest of Puritan stock. 
From his father he inherited many of his 
intellectual qualities. But from his mother 
came most of that which made him a 
prophet and a leader — ^his big heart, his 
magnetism, his genius. His spiritual nature 
and his emotional nature were from her. 
He "was not confirmed until twenty-one 
years of age, at the end of his first year in 
the Theological Seminary at Alexandria, 
Virginia. This singular postponement of 
so important a step until he was already 
entered on his immediate preparation for 
the Christian ministry, is a significant in- 
dication of the gradual nature of the work 
of grace within him. His full conversion 
was not a momentary but a lifelong proc- 
ess, as it has to be in most cases. One 
thing which made him hesitate so long in 
taking a decided stand was the fear lest 
he should lose something in submitting 
47 



RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 

his will to God's. But it became clearly 
revealed to him that life would be larger, 
richer, and fuller, when seen in the light 
of God and lived out in union with Him. 
So he chose the way of absolute surrender, 
and he never tired of impressing upon 
young men the wondrous fact that obeying 
God is freedom, that a Christian man is 
one developed to his normal condition, 
and that it is sin which cramps and dis- 
torts and is an intruder. 

He was very reticent as to his religious 
experience, and has left behind him no 
intelligible account of his conversion. But 
his biographer declares it was as deep and 
thorough as that of Augustine or Luther; 
and it is known that it w^as his strict, uni- 
form usage at Trinity Church to require 
from those coming to confirmation unmis- 
takable evidence that they had begun a 
new life and had a conscious experience of 
personal love to God, with a purpose to 
devote themselves to His service. Al- 
though almost always dumb as to his inner 
life, except as it came out in his serm.ons, 
in the June before he died he wrote a letter 
to a young man in which for once he drops 
the mask a Httle. He says: ''These last 
48 



• 



PHILLIPS BROOKS 

years have had a peace and fullness which 
there did not used to be. I am sure it is 
a deeper knowledge and truer love of Christ. 
He is here. He knows me and I know Him. 
It is not a figure of speech. It is the realest 
thing in the world. And every day makes 
it realer. And one wonders what it will 
grow to as the years go on.'* The spirit- 
uality which was a prominent feature of 
his sermons always, increased with years. 
There was a growing devotion to Christ 
which more and more mastered his whole 
being. It was the spirit of his mother which 
increasingly took possession of him. 

Within a year or two of his death, 
speaking to the St. Andrews' Brotherhood, 
he said: ''Be absolutely simple. Never say 
to any one what you do not think and be- 
lieve with your whole heart. Be simple, 
be consecrated, and, above all things, be 
pure. No man who is not himself pure 
can carry the message of God." This is 
true. And the wonderful messages of God 
which Bishop Brooks carried to such vast 
multitudes for so many years is no small 
proof of his own essential purity. It were 
easy to quote from these messages words 
which may fairly be taken as representing 
4 49 



RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 

his own personal experience, for he could 
scarcely have uttered them had he not 
first deeply felt them. Space permits us 
to give only two such passages: **I find a 
Christian who has really * received the 
Holy Ghost/ and what is it that strikes 
and delights me in him? It is the intense 
and intimate reality of Christ. Christ is 
evidently to him the clearest person in the 
universe. He talks to Christ. He dreads 
to offend Christ. He delights to please 
Christ. His whole life is light and elastic 
with this buoyant desire of doing every- 
thing for Jesus, just as Jesus would wish 
it done. So simple, but so powerful! So 
childlike, but so heroic! Duty has been 
transfigured. The weariness, the drudgery, 
the whole task-nature has been taken 
away. Love has poured like a new life- 
blood along the dry veins, and the soul 
that used to toil and groan and struggle 
goes ever singing along its way.*' **He 
has called you. Well, till the end, life here 
and hereafter will be only the unfolding of 
this personal love which seems to you so 
dear and so mysterious now. Christ will 
grow realler, nearer, more completely your 
Master and your Savior all your life. That 
SO 



PHILLIPS BROOKS 

IS the whole of your religion. But as you 
go on you will find that that is enough, that 
it is more than eternity can exhaust/* It 
was indeed the whole of this great preach- 
er's religion, and the Savior grew ever 
dearer to him all his days. 

He deeply loved God and truth and 
men. He belonged to humanity. He won 
the confidence and affection of the poor to 
an extraordinary degree. It was because 
he let his heart out toward them, not simply 
to them as a class, but to the individuals. 
He put himself to much trouble to wait 
upon any one, however lowly, that wanted 
his aid. He had a brooding love, a special 
tenderness for men and women. The city, 
on this account, was much more to him 
than the country. His mission, he said, 
was to see people. He never denied him- 
self to them when they called ; he hungered 
for them when he had been a week or two 
by himself. Everybody came to him, and 
he gave himself freely to all. It was a 
principle with him never to decline an in- 
vitation to preach, unless prevented by 
some previous engagement. He was jealous 
of religion, lest it should be treacherous to 
humanity. 

51 



' RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 

His love for truth was also intense. 
He grappled successfully with the intel- 
lectual difficulties of the day, and fairly 
conquered the doubts of the age. There 
was upon him an inward compulsion to 
translate the old doctrines into the convic- 
tions and language of modern life. He 
stood plainly for the largest freedom of in- 
quiry, and for the unimpeded march of 
the soul forward into ever larger light. He 
was a valiant champion of the new the- 
ology, counting it better than the old, 
more fully adapted to the needs of the souls 
of men. He tried to preach it, feeling sure 
that the world would never go back to the 
outworn ideas, and especially the expres- 
sions, of the past. The nature of true toler- 
ance he explained with utmost lucidity and 
maintained with utmost rigidity. 

He was not a whit spoiled by adula- 
tion; in spite of his unequaled popularity 
and continual success, his modesty and 
humility never failed; he had the same 
simple, childlike spirit at the end as at the 
beginning. Strict conscientiousness marked 
his conduct not only in dealing with others 
but with himself. His power in prayer 
was something exceptional. He knew the 
52 



PHILLIPS BROOKS 

way into the holy of holies. The bishop of 
Winchester, in dedicating a volume of 
sermons to Bishop Brooks, uses these ad- 
jectives to characterize him: ''Strong, 
fearless, tender, eloquent, incapable of 
meanness, blazing with indignation at all 
kinds of WTong, his heart and mind deep 
and wide as the ocean at his door, simple 
and transparent as a child, keen with all 
the keenness of his race/' 

He was a thoroughly good man; but it 
is not necessary to conceal the fact that 
his piety was not quite the same as it 
would have been had he belonged to the 
Methodist Episcopal rather than the Prot- 
estant Episcopal Church. He lived in 
elegant surroundings, he was a frequent 
guest at large banquets, he was not a total 
abstainer, he was a smoker. He interpreted 
Christianity quite largely in the terms of 
the class among which he moved, in whose 
society he had been brought up. How 
could it be otherwise? A person with an- 
other environment or a different education 
would feel condemned for some of the 
practices he allowed. The fact that he 
allowed them, although so very good a 
man, in no way proves that they should be 
53 



RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 

generally adopted on the one hand, nor, 
on the other hand, does it detract from his 
goodness. It is exceedingly important that 
while we keep a clear conscience ourselves 
— and it is hardly possible to have it too 
sensitive to the softest whispers of the 
Holy Spirit, the smallest departures from 
the way that seems to us right — we should 
not in any way impose our standard upon 
others or fail to give them full credit for 
the beautiful qualities which they show 
forth, though mingled with habits we 
deem harmful and that excite our surprise. 
God fulfills Himself in many ways, and 
equally loves Hie children of various 
names, though they find it sometimes hard 
thus to love or appreciate one another. 



54 



William E. Gladstone 

GLADSTONE'S piety was of the most 
thoroughgoing sort. It pervaded his 
whole being and controlled every part of 
his life. It began early and continued late. 
There was no intermission for business or 
recreation. In the midst of heaviest cares 
and largest responsibilities he did not for a 
moment forget God; he had supreme re- 
gard for conscience; he kept before him a 
lofty ideal. Not since Cromwell had there 
appeared in England a ruler in whom the 
religious motive was so prominent. He 
was a moral force quite as much as a po- 
litical one, prizing the latter mainly be- 
cause of the former. '* I contemplated sec- 
ular affairs/' he says, ''chiefly as a means 
of being useful in Church affairs.*' He was 
a Churchman fully as much as he was a 
statesman. He maintained that right and 
wrong depend on the same set of maxims 
in public life as in private. 

He taught in Sunday school as a youth, 
listened to sermons devoutly, read his 
55 



RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 

Bible regularly at Eton, and became while 
there a member of the Church. At Oxford, 
in 1830, when a little over twenty, he makes 
this entry in his diary, a characteristic one : 
''In practice, the great end is that the love 
of God may become the habit of my soul, 
and particularly these things are to be 
sought: (1) the spirit of love; (2) of self- 
sacrifice; (3) of purity; (4) of energy." 
He held prayer-meetings in his room while 
at college, and paid the closest attention 
to all religious observance, very much as 
did John Wesley at Oxford just one hun- 
dred years before. When about to end 
his college course he felt a strong drawing 
toward the ministry. In a long letter to 
his father about it, he says: ''The work 
of spreading religion has a claim infinitely 
transcending all others in dignity, in so- 
lemnity, and in usefulness.'' His mother 
wished this career for him ; his father, while 
not opposing, bade him wait for decision 
till he had seen a little more of the world. 
"This missionary impulse,'' says his bi- 
ographer, "in essence never faded. Re- 
ligion was always the center of his being." 
A few years later he joined a small brother- 
hood formed by one of his friends, with 
56 



WILLIAM E. GLADSTONE 

rules for systematic exercises of devotion 
and works of mercy. Unable to go as a 
missionary abroad, which he would have 
liked, he found a missionary field at home 
in personal labor for the fallen women of 
London. In these humane efforts at recla- 
mation he persevered all through his life, 
fearless of misconstruction, fearless of the 
levity or baseness of men^s tongues, re- 
gardless almost of the possible mischiefs to 
the public policies that depended on him. 

Few laymen ever studied the Bible 
more constantly and profitably, or re- 
ceived more practical guidance from it. 
He records in his diary how '^on most oc- 
casions of very sharp pressure or trial some 
word of Scripture has come home to me 
as if borne on angels' wings,*' and he gives 
many illustrations of it. On taking office 
as prime minister the second time, at the 
age of seventy-one, he speaks of the *' re- 
markable manner in which Holy Scripture 
has been applied to me for admonition 
and comfort.'* 

Prayer also with him was a constant 

practice and a living power, not only at 

stated times, but in the midst of affairs. 

He was greatly given to ejaculatory prayer. 

57 



RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 

Writing to his son at Oxford in 1872, after 
urging the daily reading of some portion 
of Scripture, he adds: "It is most benefi- 
cial to cultivate the habit of turning the 
thoughts to God, though but for a moment, 
in the course or during the intervals of 
business, which continually presents occa- 
sions requiring His aid and guidance.'* 
This was certainly his own practice. He 
also urged upon his son the tithing habit 
as of the utmost benefit. He attached 
great importance to the dedication of not 
less than one-tenth of our means to the 
purposes of charity and religion. His ac- 
count-books, which he kept very carefully 
with his own hand, show that he never at 
any time of his life set aside less than a 
tenth of his income for God. From 1831 
to 1897 the record shows that he gave 
about £84,000, besides £30,000 for the 
founding of the hostel and library at St. 
Deniors. 

Sunday was to him a day of rest and 
worship, which he scrupulously observed. 
Nothing short of the most urgent necessity 
hindered him from attending church twice 
on that day. On week-days he rarely 
failed to be present at the early morning 
58 



WILLIAM E. GLADSTONE 

service at the village church of Hawarden. 
On one occasion, though advanced in age, 
he made a special point of attending a 
service which had been arranged for the 
convenience of the colliers at four A. M. 
He often read the lessons himself. His 
eldest son, Stephen, was a rector, and also 
one of his sons-in-law. In his home family 
prayers were attended to every morning, 
and on Sunday evenings there was a short 
family service, at which his household was 
present in full force. 

He was far from being simply a scrupu- 
lous observer of the outward forms of re- 
ligion. His profound and unaffected piety 
impressed all who came into contact with 
him. He lived from a great depth of being. 
His most ardent longing was that he 
''might grow into the image of his Re- 
deemer." And he did so grow. He had 
much to contend with in his natural dis- 
position, for he combined the impulse, 
passion, fire, and pride of the Highlander, 
with the caution and circumspection of 
the Lowlander — he was all Scotch in 
origin. He attained complete self-mastery, 
but only by incessant wrestling in prayer. 
This is the testimony of his wife. 
59 



RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 

To him, life was a very serious business, 
*^a great and noble calling," he said; ''not 
a mean and groveling thing that we are 
to shuffle through as we can, but an ele- 
vated and lofty destiny/' He quoted, 
with hearty appreciation, the words of 
Charles Lamb, ''He gave his heart to the 
Purifier, his will to the Sovereign Will of 
the universe.'* This was what he himself 
did. The words of Dante, "In His will is 
our peace,'* were often on his lips. He 
wrote to his wife: "The final state which 
we are to contemplate with hope and to 
seek by discipline is that in which our will 
shall be one with the will of God." "What- 
ever He ordains for us is best — best both 
for us and for all." 

What a "grand old man" he came to 
be. "The contagion of the world's slow 
stain" had not infected or corrupted him. 
Though the subject of intense and causeless 
hatred, he bore no malice, took no re- 
prisals. He kept the pure faith of a child, 
though battling in the rough stream of 
affairs. He was ever loyal to his Re- 
deemer, and to the highest ideals of con- 
duct. At the close of life he gave this 
witness: "I have made mistakes enough 
60 



WILLIAM E. GLADSTONE 

in my political career, God knows. But I 
can honestly say that I have never done or 
said anything in politics In which I did 
not sincerely believe.'* Yes, he was sin- 
cere, honest, earnest, just; a knight with- 
out fear, loving freedom and devoted to 
the cause of the people, blameless in life, 
almost Quixotically conscientious, so that 
*'hls friends lived in dread of his virtues,'* 
an incarnation of public duty, a model of 
private faithfulness. 



61 



Charles G. Finney 

MR. FINNEY was born in Warren, 
Conn., August 29, 1792, and died 
at Oberlin, Ohio, August 16, 1875. His 
parents, who removed to Western New York 
when he was an infant, were neither of 
them professors of religion, and up to his 
twenty-sixth year, at which time he began 
to study law, he had never enjoyed any 
religious privileges or lived in a praying 
community. He had been brought up 
mostly in the woods, and was almost as 
ignorant of religion, he says, as a heathen. 
In connection with his law studies he be- 
came interested in the Bible, to which his 
attention was called for the first time, and 
he also came at this period for the first 
time under the influence of an educated 
minister. The Holy Spirit got hold of 
him, and when twenty-nine years old he 
had a very remarkable conversion. He 
immediately went to work for Jesus with 
immense enthusiasm, having no heart for 
anything else, and, forsaking the law, pre- 
62 



CHARLES G. FINNEY 

pared by private study for the ministry, 
to which he felt himself strongly called. 
From the very beginning the most startling 
results attended his word, and widespread 
revivals broke out. In 1835 he took hold 
of the nev/ institution at Oberlin, and from 
that time till his decease divided his ener- 
gies between the college and widely ex- 
tended evangelistic victories on both sides 
of the Atlantic. 

During the early months of 1837, while 
at work in New York City, *'the Lord was 
pleased,'' he says, **to visit my soul with 
a great refreshing. After a season of great 
searching of heart, He brought me, as He 
has often done, into a large place, and 
gave me much of that divine sweetness of 
which President Edwards speaks, as at- 
tained in his own experience.'' He ex- 
plains that he had frequently before this 
become greatly dissatisfied with his want 
of stability in faith and love, his weak- 
ness in the presence of temptation, and 
the difficulty that he found in retaining 
that communion with God, that hold upon 
the divine strength which would enable 
him efficiently to promote revivals of re- 
ligion. He began to see clearly that there 
63 



RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 

was "an altogether higher and more stable 
form of Christian life attainable/* that it 
was the privilege of all Christians to live 
without known sin or condemnation, and 
to have unbroken peace. 

A still greater baptism came upon him 
near the close of 1843, while he was con- 
ducting a revival in Boston. The Lord 
gave his soul at this time, he says, ''a very 
thorough overhauling.'* His mind became 
exceedingly exercised on the question of 
personal holiness. He gave himself to a 
great deal of prayer, and spent the days 
throughout the winter in little else than 
searching the Scriptures, much of which 
seemed new to him, and ablaze with life 
and light. He had a great struggle to con- 
secrate himself to God in a higher sense 
than he had ever before conceived obliga- 
tory or possible. His wife was in very 
feeble health, and he found difficulty in 
giving her up unqualifiedly to the will of 
God. For a long time he was unable to 
do it. But victory finally came. The in- 
finitely blessed and perfect will of God was 
welcomed in all its length and breadth as 
never before, followed by a complete resting 
in that will, an absolute satisfaction with it, 
64 



CHARLES G. FINNEY 

whatever it might bring, such as he had 
not known. ^'My mind settled into a per- 
fect stillness. My confidence in God was 
perfect. My acceptance of His will was 
perfect, and my mind was as calm as 
heaven.' ' His desires seemed all met. 
Where before prayer had been fervent and 
protracted for a long period, now he could 
only say, *'Thy will be done.'' He had 
such strong faith that God would accom- 
plish all His perfect will that he could not 
be anxious about anything, nor could he 
hardly ask for anything; his soul was en- 
tirely satisfied. He says: ''The Lord 
lifted me above anything that I had ex- 
perienced before, and taught me so much 
of the meaning of the Bible, of Christ's 
relations and power and willingness, that 
I often found myself saying to Him, 'I 
had not known or conceived that any such 
thing was true.' At times I could not real- 
ize that I had ever before been truly in 
communion with God. Since then I have 
never had those great struggles and long- 
protracted seasons of agonizing prayer that 
I had often experienced. It is quite an- 
other thing to prevail with God from what 
it was before. I can come to God with 
s 65 



RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 

more calmness because with more perfect 
confidence. He enables me now to rest in 
Him, and let everything sink into His per- 
fect will. I have felt since then a religious 
freedom, a religious buoyancy and delight in 
God and in His Word, a steadiness of faith, 
a Christian liberty and overflowing love 
that I had only experienced occasionally 
before. My bondage seemed at that time 
entirely broken; and since then I have had 
the freedom of a child with a loving parent. 
I can find God within me in such a sense 
that I can rest upon Him and be quiet; 
lay my heart in His hand, and nestle down 
in His perfect will, and have no carefulness 
or anxiety.'* 

One other experience deserves mention : 
A few years after the great refreshing of 
1843, his beloved wife died, and though he 
felt no resistance whatever to the will of 
God, as he thought, he fell into great sor- 
row that almost overwhelmed him. But 
soon the Lord showed him that if he really 
loved her, not for himself, but for her own 
sake, and for God's sake, her happiness 
with the Lord would make him rejoice in 
her joy instead of mourning so selfishly. 
This produced an instantaneous change in 
60 



CHARLES G. FINNEY 

his whole state of mind. From that mo- 
ment sorrow on account of his loss was gone 
forever. His faith became so strong and 
his mind so enlightened that he seemed to 
enter into the very state of mind in which 
she was in heaven, and to commune with 
her there, to participate in the profound 
unbroken rest in the perfect will of God, the 
union with His will, v/hich she was experi- 
encing. *'I could see that this was heaven, 
and I experienced it in my own soul. I 
have never to this day lost the blessing of 
these views. They frequently recur to me 
as the very state of mind in which the in- 
habitants of heaven are, and I can see why 
they are in such a state of blessedness." 



67 



Frances Ridley Havergal 

MISS HAVERGAL'S religious experi- 
ence divides itself naturally into two 
periods, the first of which, up to December 
2, 1873, need not detain us much, for it is 
of the common kind, marked by the usual 
doubts and struggles that hamper the 
progress of so many of God's children. 
From earliest years she longed to be a 
Christian, but received little aid. When 
about fourteen, in a revival at school, she 
took a forward step and had a sort of con- 
version, but it was far from clear or satis- 
factory to her aspiring soul, which had 
very high standards. Still, from about 
this time she assumed Christian duties and 
took a stand for Jesus. July 17, 1854, she 
was confirmed (her father being a clergy- 
man in the Church of England), and found 
a blessing in it. 

She now went on from year to year with 

a good many ups and downs, her faith 

sometimes much strengthened, sometimes 

much wavering, but with a growing beauty 

68 



FRANCES R. HAVERGAL 

in her daily life and considerable success 
from time to time in soul-winning, as well 
as large blessings on her literary labors. 
Still the unreserved surrender was not 
made, and, in consequence, permanent 
peace was not found. She remained in 
more or less bondage to the opinions of 
worldly friends. Pride and selfishness at 
times gave her sore battles and keen re- 
grets. She deeply grieved when she yielded 
to temptation, and strongly desired to rise 
to a higher level of Christian life, but she 
seemed unable to grasp the great truths 
in this direction which were faithfully 
pointed out to her. 

In the latter part of November, 1873, 
Miss Havergal received a penny tract 
with the title, **A11 for Jesus," which met 
the needs of her soul. It set forth a full- 
ness of Christian love and life, a uniform 
brightness and continuous enjoyment of 
God much beyond what she had attained. 
She wrote to the author, and, in response 
to her letter, he said a few words on the 
power of Jesus to keep those who abide in 
Him from falling, and on the continually 
present power of His blood to save, accord- 
ing to 1 John 1:7, ''The blood of Jesus 
69 



RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 

Christ His Son cleanseth us from all sin." 
Joyfully she replied, "I see it all, and I 
have the blessing." 

This surely was simple, but it made a 
wondrous change. In her own words, 
*'It Ufted her whole soul into sunshine of 
which all she had previously experienced 
was but as pale and passing April gleams, 
compared with the fullness of summer 
glory." Henceforth her peace and joy 
flowed onwards, deepening and widening 
under the teaching of the Holy Ghost. 
Her surrender was never retracted, but it 
was constantly renewed and revised in the 
continual endeavor to keep the consecra- 
tion up to the ever-increasing light. There 
was a very blessed and almost uninter- 
rupted progress as she pressed toward the 
mark. 

In the few years that followed before 
she passed to heaven (June 3, 1879) she 
was able nearly always to sound very clear 
high notes of triumph to the honor of her 
Lord, We append a few expressions from 
her letters: *'I have not a fear or a 
doubt or a care or a shadow of a shadow 
upon the sunshine of my heart. Every day 
brings some quite new cause for praise." 
70 



FRANCES R. HAVERGAL 

^'My whole heart says, 'Whom have I in 
heaven but Thee? And there is none upon 
earth that I desire beside Thee.' '* **I 
never feel eager even for usefulness now; 
it is happier to leave it all to Him, and I 
always pray, *Use me, Lord, or not use 
me, just as Thou wilt/ " ''Life is now 
Vv^hat I never dreamed life on earth could 
be, though I knew much of peace and joy 
in believing before/' "The blessing not 
only lasts but increases. It is even having 
a great effect upon my health; for all 
touch of worry, care, anxiety, and fidget 
about anything earthly or heavenly is all 
gone. Jesus takes it all, and the rest of 
faith is more perfect and uninterrupted 
than I imagined it possible for any one of 
my nervous, high-strung temperament to 
enjoy.'' "Now, *Thy will be done' is not 
a sigh, but a song." "It is such a glorious 
life, this life of utter surrender, continual 
cleansing, absolute trust, and implicit 
obedience." "The really leaving every- 
thing to Him is so inexpressibly sweet, and 
surely He does arrange so much better 
than we could for ourselves when we leave 
it all to Him." " Is it not delicious to know 
that He chooses every bit of our work, 
71 



RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 

and orders every moment of our waiting? 
What a Master we have!" ** 'Great is 
Thy faithfulness ' shines out upon the past, 
and *I will fear no evil' upon the future." 
*' There seems no room for the word dis- 
appointment in the happy life of entire 
trust in Jesus and satisfaction with His 
perfect and glorious will." 

Miss Havergal was called to pass 
through very severe trials, bereavements, 
heavy losses by fire, and failures of publish- 
ing houses, and intense, protracted, pain- 
ful illness. Her triumph in these things 
was unquestionable. She was brought to 
the borders of the grave by a long, lingering 
fever, but kept in perfect peace. She says: 
^*I am so very happy that it has really 
seemed worth being prayed back from the 
very gates of heaven, if I may but tell of 
His faithfulness. Not one good thing hath 
failed." *'He has granted me fully to re- 
joice in His will. I am not conscious of 
even a wish crossing it. He giveth songs 
in the night. I feel as if it had intensified 
my trust. I do trust Him utterly, and feel 
as if I could not help trusting Him." **I 
have not one regret or quiver of longing 
for anything but what He appoints. He 
72 



FRANCES R. HAVERGAL 

hath done all things well. How sure we 
are of that/' "I am so very glad He did 
not answer prayer for my recovery all 
those eight months of illness. Why, I 
should have missed all sorts of blessing 
and precious teaching if He had." 

She was so eager to advance that the 
searching processes were welcomed. She 
did not shrink from painful discoveries of 
evil, because she so greatly wanted to have 
the unknown depths cleansed as well as 
what came rnore readily to the surface. 
And Gk)d carried on His work within her 
in the usual way, by gradual disclosures as 
she was fitted to bear it. There were times 
when she felt that her watchfulness had 
not been quite perfect; that the eye of 
faith had wandered, for a moment at least, 
from Jesus; that there had been a less 
ready and hearty response than there 
should have been to some unexpected and 
trying requirement of the Master; that 
there was a less eager searching to know 
and pressing on to do the whole will of 
God than was possible; that through some 
remissness or rashness or half unconscious- 
ness self-seeking or evil speaking or inward 
fretting, the close communion had been a 
73 



RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 

little clouded as He withdrew the bright- 
ness of His shining, and some small spot 
or wrinkle had marred the snowy robe of 
perfect righteousness. She could not al- 
ways feel so sure as she wished that the 
temptation to spiritual pride had not met 
w^ith some slight consent and so partaken 
a little of the nature of sin. Her sensitive 
conscience and strict self -judgment led her 
to set down several accusations of this 
sort against herself in the course of her 
correspondence. She did not count herself 
to have reached perfection. She was ready 
to confess that the full continual draughts 
of *' shadowless communion'* which she 
believed possible she did not possess; and 
occasionally there were humbling revela- 
tions of failure in fullest consecration. It 
was not till August, 1878, that God showed 
her the inconsistency of a Christian's re- 
taining a large amount of superfluous 
jewelry while the heathen were perishing 
for the gospel. And not till two or three 
months before her death did she take any 
decided stand or do any work for the cause 
of total abstinence. 

But it should be distinctly understood 
that very rare and very brief were the 
74 



II 



FRANCES R. HAVERGAL 

pauses In the triumphant onward march 
of her Christian character. Her whole soul 
was wrapped up In honoring her beloved 
Lord. '4 don't ask Him to guide my 
words, but to give me His," she writes. 
And He did speak through her to the up- 
lifting of multitudes In a very wonderful 
way. Her sweet hymns have thrilled the 
Church universal. She sang for Jesus as 
very few have done. She was a most ardent 
Bible student. Her prose works are com- 
pletely saturated with Scripture. She com- 
mitted to memory all the New Testament 
and the devotional parts of the Old. 
Nothing less than a volume of description 
would do anything like justice to her 
beautiful life. 

In the midst of her forty-third year 
God took her to Himself. It is little to 
say that she did not fear death. Any such 
feeling in the face of her Father's mes- 
senger would have been quite Impossible. 
To be with the King was her deepest de- 
sire. She astonished the doctor by the 
inquiry, *^Do you think I have a chance 
of going?'* When great agony came on 
she whispered, ^4t 's home the faster. 
God's will is delicious. He makes no mls- 
75 



RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 

takes.'* When the end was thought to be 
very near she asked, "Do you really think 
I am going to-day?'* The doctor said, 
''Probably." And her reply was, ''Beauti- 
ful; too good to be true." Soon after, look- 
ing up smiling, she said, "Splendid to be 
so near the gates of heaven." This, and 
"So beautiful to go," was again and again 
repeated. "Do speak bright, bright words 
about Jesus," she said; "He is so good to 
take me now. Come, Lord Jesus, come 
and fetch me." And so, amid anguish of 
body, but with victory in her soul and 
glorious radiance upon her face, she passed 
up to meet in heaven the Master whom 
she had so faithfully served on earth. 



76 



Charles George Gordon 

GORDON'S birthday was January 28, 
1833, and his crowning day January 
26, 1885 — ^slain by Arab spears or rifle- 
balls at Khartoum, diademed by the Al- 
mighty somewhere in the upper regions. 
His father was a lieutenant-general in the 
Royal Artillery, stationed at Woolwich, 
when Charles was born, and the latter was 
educated in the Military Academy there. 
Whether he ever had any experience which 
corresponds at all closely to what we call 
conversion is not clear. There is, at least, 
no account of it in any of the many books 
about him which have appeared, or any of 
his voluminous journals and letters. His 
brother writes: ^'It is difficult to say at 
what period of his life his thoughts began 
to take a serious turn. One thing is quite 
certain, and that is, that through his 
mother's loving tenderness the seed was 
sown in childhood, and that the terrible 
scenes of rapine, starvation, and murder 
he witnessed in China caused that seed to 
77 



RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 



bring forth its own fruit in good time." 
Rev. Mr. Barnes says: "He told me that 
he could not remember a period when 
thinking of these things (the joys of 
heaven) he had not longed for death." 
Before Sebastopol, when he was twenty- 
one, we find cropping out in letters and 
journals much the same ideas that charac- 
terized his whole life. He was never con- 
nected directly with any section of profess- 
ing Christians. The two he most favored 
were the English Presbyterians and the 
Church of England. He was truly catholic, 
finding good in all, and as ready to help 
the poor of one sect as of another. ''Prot- 
estants and Catholics," he said, ''are but 
soldiers of different regiments in the same 
army." 

He was by no means without weaknesses 
and faults. He had many peculiarities and 
eccentricities. Inaction was intolerable to 
him, and he had an almost morbid appre- 
ciation of the value of time. Hence he 
was not always placid or patient. Impa- 
tience and pride, or the fear of their rising 
again, though so firmly held down, troubled 
him more or less to the end. He w^as not 
in all things worthy to be an example, not 
78 



CHx^RLES G. GORDON 

a model of all the virtues, and he would 
have been the last to claim it, or to profess 
entire deliverance from a sinful nature. 
But there have been very few men who 
strove so earnestly to confomi their lives 
to the will of God or to imitate Jesus 
Christ. He seemed to care for nothing ex- 
cept to serve his Lord and to do good. A 
prayer he often uttered was, "May I be 
ground to dust if He will glorify Himself 
in me.*' Much of his life was a living sac- 
rifice for the sins of others. He stands out 
not as a little hill, but as one of the moun- 
tains of God, a hero among heroes, a saint 
among saints. Says Rev. H. C. Wilson, 
who was with him much at Gravesend: 
'*I never knew a man who lived so near to 
God. He literally looked not at the seen, 
but at the unseen, and endured as seeing 
Him who is invisible.** Said one who was 
conversant with his life in Ireland: ''I 
knew General Gordon well, and if it were 
possible for a man to be deified on account 
of his goodness, Gordon was the man.** 
An officer in the army who knew him inti- 
mately, said, ** Gordon was the nearest ap- 
proach to Christ Jesus of any man that 
ever lived.** Mr. Lawrence Oliphant 
79 



RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 

called him '^the most Christly man I ever 
knew/' And of such testimonies many 
more have been given. 

His unworldliness could in no way be 
hid from the gaze of those about him. 
They felt in him all the naturalness of a 
little child, the strangeness also of child- 
hood that has not yet learned our poor 
earthly values or our low earthly language. 
He was not at home in conventional so- 
ciety, hated to be lionized, disliked deco- 
rations, fled from human praise. He was 
not a dreamer; he was sim.ply awake in the 
world of dreamers, under an open sky, 
while the rest were shut in. Nothing irri- 
tated him more than to be effusively 
thanked. The desire to efface himself 
entered into the small details of life, and 
amounted almost to a disease. He would 
never talk of himself or his doings. His 
four principles of life, he said, were: **(!) 
Entire self-forgetf ulness ; (2) absence of 
pretension; (3) refusal to accept as a mo- 
tive the world's praise or disapproval; 
(4) to follow in all things the will of God.'' 

It is his unwavering trust in God, his 

absolute faith, perhaps, more than any one 

thing which would be selected as the lead- 

80 



: 



CHARLES G GORDON 

ing feature of his character. He said: 
'* Either I must believe He does all things 
in mercy and love, or I must disbelieve in 
His existence; there is no half-way in that 
matter for me/' ^*It is quite impossible 
that any one can be happy, or even tran- 
quil, unless he accepts the faith that God 
rules every little item in our daily lives, 
permitting the evil and turning it to our 
good." ** Whatsoever happens is best; God 
directs all things, great and small, in infi- 
nite wisdom.*' *^The whole of religion 
consists in looking to God as the true 
Ruler, and above the agents He uses: the 
flesh will always look to the agents." ''I 
can not wish things were different from 
what they are, for if I do so, then I wish 
my will, not His, to be done." '*In this 
life the position we occupy is as nothing; 
each is in his right place." '*When you 
bow to the will of God you die to the 
world." 

''Be not thou moved," was one of his 
favorite watchwords. And his keen appre- 
ciation of the superior delights of the next 
world was one of the principal causes why 
the delights and dangers of this world had 
so little power to move him. He looked 
« 81 



RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 

forward to death as a great boon, an ines- 
timable blessing, above all things to be 
desired. He writes: '*Sonie one has said 
to me that my sister's marriage might 
shorten my mother's life, as if it were a 
thing to be lamented. " ^^If you see any 
one fading away, envy him or her, and 
say, *How long shall I be passed over; 
when will my time come?' " *'One bless- 
ing of the Christian's Hfe is that he daily 
grows younger and younger and is, as it 
were, born when he dies." To the king of 
Abyssinia, who threatened him with death, 
he replied that he was entirely ready to 
die, and that in killing him the king would 
only confer a favor, opening a door he 
must not open for himself. 

He was a simple, strong, unselfish man, 
a knight of the nineteenth century. The 
days and the deeds of chivalry were in 
him more than repeated. They were 
heightened because of the loftier motives 
which lighted him on his lonely way. For 
if ever one was possessed with a fervent 
love for man, combined with a passion for 
God's glory and a supreme devotion to 
the will divine, it certainly was he. He 
was free from cant. He did not press re- 
82 



CHARLES G. GORDON 

ligion indiscriminately on all, being a man 
of exceeding great common sense; but 
wherever he felt that it would do, he in- 
troduced the subject, and deHghted in 
nothing so much as to talk about the things 
of the Kingdom. He was an assiduous 
tract distributor in a quiet way. Before 
leaving England for Khartoum the last 
time, he sent to each member of the cabinet 
a copy of ^'Clarke on the Scripture Prom- 
ises,'' which was one of his favorite books. 
The ** Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius" was 
held by him in the very highest esteem, 
and also Kempis' ** Imitation of Christ.'* 
On his final departure from England, 
he sent to a friend, from the War Office, 
this telegram: ^*I go to the Soudan to- 
night; if He goes with me, all must be 
well." And he had no doubt as to God's 
going with him. The whole story of his 
life is written in these simple words. He 
called the presence of God his Koh-i-noor. 
The last letter which he sent from Khar- 
toum, December 14, 1884, just before the 
veil shut in around him, contains these 
closing words: '*God rules all; and as He 
will rule to His glory and our welfare, His 
will be done. I am quite happy, thank 
83 



RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 

God, and, like Lawrence, I have tried to 
do my duty.'' 

On the magnificent memorial tablet 
erected to him in St. Paul's, appear these 
words : * * To M aj or General Charles George 
Gordon, . . . who at all times and 
everywhere gave his strength to the weak, 
his substance to the poor, his sympathy to 
the suffering, and his heart to God.'* 



S4 



Alfred Cookman 

ALFRED COOKMAN (1828-1871) had 
^ a genius for religion; he was a spir- 
itual seer, belonging to the highest royalty 
of earth. Born at Columbia, Pa., son 
of the distinguished George G. Cookman, 
he was early consecrated to the ministry 
by a most godly mother, and soundly con- 
verted when a boy of ten while at school in 
Carlisle. Entering the Philadelphia Con- 
ference in 1848, he filled the most promi- 
nent appointments in leading cities for 
many years, and was exceedingly active 
at camp meetings, until he swept through 
the gates of death at Newark, ^ hashed in 
the blood of the Lamb,*' and triumphantly 
ascended to Him whom he had loved so 
fervently. 

While preaching on the Attleboro Cir- 
cuit in Pennsylvania, before he was twenty, 
through the influence of Bishop Hamline, 
he made a more intelligent, specific, and 
carefully complete surrender than had be- 
fore been possible, thus inaugurating a 
85 



RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 

new religious epoch, and entering on the 
blessed rest of a decidedly higher life, 
counting himself, as he says, ** wholly 
sanctified through the power of the Holy 
Ghost.** ^^ Peace, broad, deep, full, satis- 
fying, sacred peace," he says, ''was the 
immediate effect. O what blessed rest in 
Jesus! What a conscious union and con- 
stant communion with God ; what increased 
power to do or suffer the will of the Father ; 
what confidence in prayer; what joy in 
religious conversation; what an illumina- 
tion in the perusal of the sacred Word; 
what increased unction in the performance 
of public duties!** After enjoying this for 
a short time, he lost it through grieving 
the Spirit of God at Conference by foolish 
joking, hilarious story-telling, and tobacco- 
smoking. 

For some unexplained reason — lack of 
proper teaching, probably — he allowed 
more than nine sad, crippled, and wasted 
years to elapse before he renewed his cov- 
enant. He did this July 16, 1856, giving 
up his tobacco and all doubtful indulgences, 
and entering into a wealthy place, from 
which he never afterward consciously de- 
parted. From this time on full salvation 
86 



ALFRED COOKMAN 

was his distinctive theme, his abiding joy. 
We do not find, however, that he inter- 
mitted his endeavors after greater nearness 
to Christ. In 1862 his testimony was: 
''I have been able to say for years, 'I am 
saved througli the blood of Jesus Christ/ 
I have no doubt of my personal purity, 
but I want to be filled with the Spirit. I 
am hungering and thirsting after right- 
eousness, and God is filling me. I have 
been too anxious for all the fullness at 
once; but I am willing to be filled as God 
may determine. I am climbing up. I 
do n't leave my present standpoint, but I 
am climbing up, and wish to do so for ever 
and ever.'* Again he said: ''It is the 
special desire of my heart that I may be 
filled with God. I am panting for more of 
God, more of His truth, more of His holi- 
ness, more of His power; I want the full- 
ness of the blessing of the gospel of peace." 
At a later date, 1871, shortly before his 
death, he got yet clearer revelations as to 
the path to perfection, and says: *'I used 
to maintain that the blood was sufficient, 
but I am coming to know that tribulation 
brings us to the blood that cleanseth. I 
have known for many years what it is to 
87 



RELIGIOUS EXPERIENXE 

be washed in the blood of the Lamb; now 
I understand the full meaning of that 
verse, 'These are they which came out 
of great tribulation,' perfect or purified 
through suffering." And not far from the 
same time he wrote: ''Cleansed from sin, 
let us go on, concerned to be \\'ithout 
wrinkle or any such thing. After the wash- 
ing or purifying there are other processes 
used by the power or Spirit of God in 
smxoothing and adorning and perfecting our 
characters. We want to be presented 
faultless before the throne of God with 
exceeding J03'." 

He certainly impressed all who came 
in contact with him for years that he was 
ever intent — increasingly so as time wore 
on — upon one object, the greatest likeness 
to Jesus. One-tenth of his income was ded- 
icated strictly to religious uses. He had a 
firm faith in the care of Di\'ine Providence. 
A young man in Newark, speaking highly 
of his goodness after his death, was asked 
if he had often heard him preach. ''No,*' 
said he, "T have never heard him preach, 
but I ha\'e watched him as he was walking 
along the street." 

His last weeks were a wonderful com- 
88 



ALFRED COOKMAN 

pound of keenest physical agony and high- 
est spiritual joy. With every sharp, ex- 
cruciating pain (from acute inflammatory 
rheumatism) he felt that Jesus pressed him 
even rnore closely to His great heart of 
love. He counted himself immensely the 
gainer from his sufferings. He said: 
**My Church is very dear to me; my wife 
and children are very precious; my friends 
are dear to me; but the sweet will of God 
I love better than all else ; I have no choice 
to live or die. If I could have life on earth 
by the lifting of my hand, I would not. 
If Jesus should ask me would I live or die, 
I would answer, 'I refer it back to Thee.' 
The great concern on my mind has been to 
know exactly what is the design of my 
Heavenly Father in this dispensation. It 
has wonderfully increased my interest in 
and sympathy for suffering humanity. It 
has realized to me the power and precious- 
ness of many parts of Scripture. It has 
satisfied me of the independent action of 
the soul, for when my whole lower nature 
seemed to be quivering and quailing 
through excruciating pain, my higher being 
not only trusted but triumphed in the God 
of my salvation. The best hours of my 
89 



RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 

illness were when the fierce fires of suflfer- 

ing were kindling and scorching all around 
me. It has convinced me that full salva- 
tion is the only preparation for the ten 
thousand contingencies that belong to a 
mortal career." 

So he passed to his great rew^ard, leav- 
ing behind him a deathless name. He was 
ever on the stretch for the highest things, 
a blameless and beautiful character, a 
glowing witness to the Spirit-filled life, and 
a consistent exemplifier of the closest 
walk with God. 



90 



Henry Drummond 

IT must be confessed that Henry Drum- 
mond was not exactly a saint of the con- 
ventional sort, or after what may be called 
the regulation pattern, as it is commonly 
conceived. He was very fond of athletics, 
was fascinated with fishing and hunting, 
a keen chess-player, a boon companion of 
boys to the end, very much given to smok- 
ing, always well dressed, had a strong sense 
of humor, and a plentiful supply of hob- 
bies, among them that of collecting old, 
carved, oak furniture; was a pronounced 
evolutionist, and decidedly modern in his 
views of the Bible. Yet that he was far 
beyond the ordinary in goodness and holi- 
ness, all that came into closest contact 
with him bear willing witness. Professor 
George Adam Smith, his chief biographer, 
says, '* There are hundreds of men and 
women who will always be sure that his 
was the most Christlike life they ever 
knew.*' This is the testimony of those 
that knew him longest and most intimately; 
91 



RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 

that he lived constantly m the thirteenth 
chapter of First Corinthians, appropriating 
its blessings and exemplifying its teachings. 
Mr. D. L. Moody, than whom on all ac- 
counts there is none more competent to 
speak, said: ''Never have I known a man 
w^ho, in my opinion, lived nearer the Master 
or sought to do His w^ill more fully. No 
man has ever been with me for any length 
of time that I did not see in him something 
that was unlike Christ, and I often do it 
In myself, but not in Henry Drummond. 
He was the most Christlike man I ever 
knew." Sir Archibald Geikie, who taught 
him and traveled much with him, said: 
"I have never met with a man In whom 
transparent integrity, high moral purpose, 
sweetness of disposition, and exuberant 
helpfulness were more happily combined 
with wide culture, poetic Imagination, and 
scientific sympathies than they were In 
Henry Drummond." Still another says, 
''He seemed to possess all the graces and 
virtues of which as perfect man I dreamed." 
Men and women of every rank of life, 
and of almost every nation under the sun 
turned to him for the inspiration which 
can only come from the purest, and poured 
92 



HENRY DRUMMOND 

into his receptive soul their freest confi- 
dences and confessions. He was both 
prophet and priest to a great host. He 
was a born evangeHst. And after the 
Moody and Sankey campaign in Scotland 
— 1873-1874 — which found him in college 
at Edinburgh, and in which he was mar- 
velously useful, evangelism became the 
master passion of his life the rest of his 
days. He had long dreamed of it, and he 
was eminently fitted for it — a great fisher 
of men, one of the Andrew type, pleasant 
mannered, always getting hold of some- 
body and introducing people to Christ. 
This was his most enduring work for the 
Master — personal contact with others, into 
whose very hearts he easily entered by a 
marvelous sympathy. Never, perhaps, was 
any man so loved as he. He had a genius 
for friendship, an absorbing interest in 
others, looking upon their things rather 
than his own. He had the humility of self- 
forgetfulness, the patience of love, was al- 
ways courteous, kind, genial, simple, sunny, 
and hopeful. He gave sympathy freely, 
but never called for it. He showed a 
Christianity which was perfectly natural, 
unforced, and unassuming. And yet he 
93 



RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 

did not follow the fashions of society; did 
not care for the things of this world, seeing 
its extreme littleness in comparison with 
the attractions of the hereafter, and he 
never bowed to Mrs. Grundy. He carried 
about him an air of distinction, but it was 
an air of purity, not of pride. He belonged 
to the true aristocracy of passionate souls 
— those who live not on the circumference 
of things, but at the center — live for the 
things most worth while. With very lofty 
conceptions of his duty toward his fellow- 
men, which prompted him to sink personal 
preferences and ease, he had also an un- 
faltering trust in God and a deep devotion 
to His will. He preached an extended 
series of discourses on the will of God, find- 
ing it, as he says, his ^'freshest truth, a pro- 
found and marvelous subject, a great help to 
many of my friends.'* He was intensely 
spiritual. ** I have only one passion ; that is 
Christ,'* he said, and his daily life and con- 
versation were absolutely consistent, his 
friends declare, with this all-embracing 
confession of faith. 

The ease and winsomeness of his piety 

was, it should be said, largely inherited. 

His parents were deeply religious as well 

94 



HENRY DRUMMOND 

as evangelical in doctrine, and his early 
home was permeated with a bracing Chris- 
tian atmosphere. He was born at Sterling, 
August 17, 1851, and died at Tunbridge 
Wells, March 11, 1897. He began to be a 
Christian at nine years of age, when he was 
found, a little, curly-headed boy, weeping 
to think he had never loved the dear 
Savior. At this time doubtless he gave his 
heart to Jesus. He quite early received 
what he considered a call to the direct serv- 
ice of God, but, somewhat singularly, he 
felt no drawing to the ordinary work of the 
ministry. And though he went, not only 
through the college, but also through the 
theological classes at Edinburgh (1866- 
1876), and was even licensed to preach in 
1878, he rejected all invitations to settle 
as a pastor. It is true that he was ordained 
in 1884, but this was only to comply with 
the regulations of the Free Church, that 
he might take the chair of natural science 
in Glasgow Theological College. He always 
declined to be called ''reverend,'' or preach 
in the usual acceptation of that term. He 
gave addresses, lectures, and Bible-read- 
ings. He appeared to feel that any touch 
of professionalism would hinder him in 
95 



RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 

getting close to those he so much wished 
to reach — the young men and boys, the 
students of the colleges and universities of 
Scotland, England, Ireland, America, and 
Australia — with whom he was such a power 
for good. 

He reached, with voice and pen, a 
wider constituency than almost any other 
religious teacher of his time. His first 
book, which made him so speedily famous, 
'* Natural Law In the Spiritual World," had 
attained a sale of 130,000 copies some years 
ago In England alone, to say nothing of the 
vast number sold In other lands. His 
Christmas booklets had an amazing circu- 
lation. ''The Greatest Thing In the 
World," Issued at Christmas, 1889, had 
sold In Great Britain before the author 
died 330,000 copies; ''Pax Voblscum," 
issued In 1890, sold 130,000 copies In six 
years. Others of the series, not quite so 
popular, sold 90,000, 80,000, 60,000 copies. 
Who can estimate the good that was thus 
done? 

But his greatest contribution to religion 

was himself. As Mr. H. W. Mabie has 

said: "He was a fine example of natural 

goodness, a beautiful type of normal re- 

96 



HENRY DRUMMOND 

ligious unfolding. He was without cant, 
exaggeration, undue emphasis of one side 
of life to the exclusion of the other, af- 
fectation of speech, or self-consciousness." 
He found the heart of Christianity, the 
secret of pure manhood, and a beneficent 
life in a personal friendship for Christ, and 
this was his chief message. Dr. Marcus 
Dodds, one of his teachers, to whose in- 
fluence he was fond of expressing his su- 
preme indebtedness for whatever benefit 
his life had been, said at the funeral: ''To 
any one who had need of him he seemed to 
have no concerns of his own to attend to; 
he was wholly at the disposal of those 
whom he could help. It was this active 
and self-forgetting sympathy, this sensi- 
tiveness to the condition of every one he 
met which won the heart of peer and peas- 
ant, which made him the most delightful 
of companions and the most serviceable 
of friends. Penetrate as deeply as you 
might into his nature and scrutinize it as 
keenly, you never met anything to disap- 
point, anything to incline you to suspend 
your judgment or modify your verdict that 
here you had a man as nearly perfect as 
you had ever known any one to be. And 
7 97 



RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 

at the heart of all lay his profound religious 
reverence, his unreserved acceptance of 
Christ and of Christ^s idea of law and life. 
He was through and through, first of all 
and last of all, a follower and a subject of 
Christ/' 

Yet, like the Master and most other 
good men, he had many enemies, because 
he was much misunderstood. Their at- 
tacks were often cruel, and he sometimes 
felt them, but he never retaliated in kind. 
He was obliged to depart from the school 
of the older orthodoxy, even as was Jesus. 
He did his best to help on the movement 
tow^ard a more solid, because more reason- 
able, faith, and a truer, purer Christianity. 
They who think this detracted from his 
saintliness must part company with D. L. 
Moody, who, though most strictly ortho- 
dox himself, was great enough to see that 
this was not the matter of highest impor- 
tance, and that mere differences of opinion 
on doctrine furnish no reason for diminu- 
tion of sincere admiration or reverent 
friendship. 

We find him, however, on his nineteenth 
birthday, writing in his private journal, 
which was never seen during his life, *'I 
98 



HENRY DRUMMOND 

think that I can honestly say that the chief 
desire of my heart is to be reconciled to 
God, and to feel the light of His coun- 
tenance always upon me. As honestly I 
think I can say that God in His great good- 
ness has given me little care for the things 
of the world.'' 

Later, in his interleaved Testament, he 
gives this ^'Receipt for misery: Be a half- 
hearted Christian.'' That he never was. 
He said, '*I am afraid to move a single 
step without searching the Scripture and 
prayer to know the mind of the only wise 
God." 



99 



Dwight Lyman Moody 

THE son who wrote Mr. Moody's bi- 
ography declares: ** Father lived 
solely for the glory of God and for the 
spread of the gospel of Jesus Christ/' 
And again: ^' For nearly half a century his 
one aim in life was to do the will of God/' 
Professor Towner testified: ^*I have never 
met a man who came so near Christ's 
standard as he." That he lived wholly 
for God, with a passionate devotion to the 
work of saving souls, and was remarkably 
successful in winning men to God, is so 
manifest as to need no enlargement. And 
the fact makes it incumbent on us to in- 
quire for the secret of his achievements. 
That he could have done what he did in 
so many directions had he not been really 
a great man is inconceivable. Professor 
Drummond says: ^* Moody was the big- 
gest human I ever met." And another 
gave testimony: *4n sheer brain size, in 
the raw material of intellect, Moody stands 
among the first three or four great men I 
100 



DWIGHT L. MOODY 

have ever known/* He had so many of the 
qualities that win that he would have made 
a huge mark in the world in almost any 
Une of action. 

He chose religion, and he had for this 
some important helps. He had, in the 
first place, an exceedingly good mother, to 
whose wise training he owed much; and, 
in the second place, a sound conversion. 
Leaving his home at Northfield, Mass. 
(born February 5, 1837), he went to Boston 
to make his way when seventeen, and there, 
through the labors of a faithful Sunday 
school teacher, was speedily brought to 
Christ. Soon after his reception into the 
Church (Mt. Vernon Congregational) he 
removed to Chicago to improve his for- 
tunes, and there threw himself with char- 
acteristic energy not only into making 
money, but into working for his Savior, 
especially in the Sunday school line. 

It was in connection with this that, in 
1861, he received the first of those marked 
spiritual uplifts that made him what he 
was. The story has been often told: One 
of the teachers in the school he superin- 
tended, finding that he was soon to die of 
consumption, and being much distressed 
101 



RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 

over the fact that he had never led any of 
his class to Christ, went round with Moody 
to all their houses and pleaded with them 
till the last one had yielded. Then, the 
night before the teacher had to leave, the 
class was called together for a prayer- 
meeting. Mr. Moody says: ''Then God 
kindled a fire in my soul that has never 
gone out. The height of my ambition had 
been to be a successful merchant, and if I 
had known that meeting was going to take 
that ambition out of me I might not have 
gone. But how many times I have thanked 
God since for that meeting. As I went 
from it I said to myself, 'O God, let me 
die rather than lose the blessing I have 
received to-night.* *' 

He did not lose it, but, on the contrary, 
added to it many others. Not all are re- 
corded, but special mention is made in his 
biography of no less than five, as the years 
went on. One came on his first visit to 
Great Britain in 1867. There he heard 
words which, his son says, marked the be- 
ginning of a new era in his life. They were 
uttered by Mr. Henry Varley, and were as 
follows: ''The world has yet to see what 
God will do with, and for, and in, and by, 
102 



DWIGHT L. MOODY 

and through a man who is fully and wholly 
consecrated to Him/' This was not wholly 
true, for God had already shown, through 
Wesley as well as through others, what He 
could do with men entirely given up to 
Him. Nevertheless, it made a great im- 
pression on the mind of Mr. Moody. He 
reflected: *^He did not say a great man, 
nor a learned man, nor a rich man, nor a 
wise man, nor an eloquent man, but simply 
a man. I am a man, and it lies with the 
man himself whether or not he will make 
that entire and full consecration. I will 
try my best to be that man." The im- 
pression was deepened by another remark, 
made by Mr. Bewley, of Dublin, who in- 
quired if he was ''all O and O,** meaning 
all out and out for Christ. ''From that 
time forward,'* says the biographer, **the 
endeavor to be 'O and O' for Christ was 
supreme." 

It was not very long after this when 
another epoch in Mr. Moody's experience 
was marked by his intercourse with Henry 
Moorhouse, whose acquaintance he made 
in Dublin, and who came over to Chicago 
to preach for Mr. Moody in the church he 
had there established, preaching for seven 
103 



RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 

successive nights, on the one text, ''God so 
loved the world." A specially sweet bap- 
tism of love seems to have been the result. 
Again, in 1871, came a crisis which meant 
much to him. An intense hunger and 
thirst for spiritual power was aroused in 
him by two women who used to attend his 
meetings and sit on the front seat. He 
could see by the expression on their faces 
that they were praying. They told him 
that they were praying for him, because he 
needed the power of the Spirit and an 
anointing for special ser\'ice. They talked 
and prayed with him. He says: ''There 
came a great hunger into my soul. I did 
not know what it was. I began to cry out 
as I never did before. I really felt that I 
did not want to live if I could not have 
this power for service.** While he was in 
this mental and spiritual condition, Chi- 
cago was laid in ashes by the big fire. He 
worked hard to repair the losses, but he 
says: "My heart was not in the w^ork of 
begging. I was crying all the time that 
God would fill me with His Spirit. Well, 
one day in the city of New York — O what 
a day! — I can not describe it; I seldom re- 
fer to it; it is almost too sacred an experi- 
104 



DWIGHT L. MOODY 

ence to name. I can only say that God re- 
vealed Himself to me, and I had such an 
experience of His love that I had to ask 
Him to stay His hand. The blessing came 
upon me suddenly, like a flash of Hghtning. 
I was filled with a sense of God's good- 
ness, and felt as though I could take the 
whole world to my heart. I went to preach- 
ing again. The sermons were not differ- 
ent; I did not present new truths, and yet 
hundreds were converted. I would not 
now be placed back where I was before 
that blessed experience if you should give 
me all the world — it would be as the small 
dust of the balance. Since then I have 
never lost the assurance that I am walking 
in communion with God, and I have a joy 
in His service that sustains me and makes 
it easy work. I believe I was an older 
man then than I am now; I have been 
growing younger ever since. I used to be 
very tired when preaching three times a 
week; now I can preach five times a day 
and never get tired at all. I have done 
three times the work I did before, and it 
gets better and better every year. It is 
so easy to do a thing when love prompts 
you." 

105 



RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 

In the next year (1872) he was in Eng- 
land again, and attended the Mildmay 
Conference in London. He thus records 
his impression of the Rev. William Penne- 
father, founder of Mildmay: '*I well re- 
member seeing the beloved Mr. Penne- 
father's face illumined, as it were, with 
heaven's light. I do n't think I can recall 
a word that he said, but the whole at- 
mosphere of the man breathed holiness, 
and I got then a lift and impetus in the 
Christian life that I have never lost, and 
I believe the impression will remain with 
me to my dying day. I thank God that 
I saw and spoke with that holy man. No 
one could see him without the conscious- 
ness that he lived in the presence of God.'* 

One other special experience is given 
which occurred much later (1892) when, 
on his voyage from England, he came 
very near being shipwrecked. He found 
himself, in the face of that imminent peril, 
not as calm as he should have been, not 
wholly delivered from the fear of death. 
He writes: *^It was the darkest hour of 
my life. I could not endure it. I must 
have relief, and relief came in prayer. 
God heard my cry, and enabled me to 
106 



DWIGHT L. MOODY 

say from the depth of my heart, *Thy 
will be done/ Sweet peace came to my 
souL Let it be Northfield or heaven, it 
made no difference now/' He was de- 
Uvered from all his fears, and fell asleep 
almost immediately. 

While a great spiritual blessing and 
uplift came to him in 1861, it is clear that 
other and perhaps greater blessings, es- 
pecially that in 1871, had to follow for the 
carrying on of the work of God in his 
soul, and that even as late as 1892 there 
was still something to be done. We be- 
lieve this to be God's usual way, revealing 
the need gradually as the soul is best fitted 
to bear it, and to take advantage of the 
opportunities brought in sight. Most 
people do not seize these opportunities nor 
keep their hearts open to these calls. But 
Mr. Moody was so deeply desirous of the 
best things, that he let slip no chance of 
spiritual gain. ''One thing,*' was his 
motto. Concentration and intensity char- 
acterized him; also simplicity and hu- 
mility. He was willing to learn from every 
one. 

Nothing is more marked about him 
than his devotion to God's Word, and his 
107 



RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 

very high estimate of the importance of 
prayer. He rose at daybreak, at five 
o'clock or at six, according to the season, 
to get an hour of quiet, solitary com- 
munion with God, while his mind was 
fresh, as an indispensable preparation for 
the day's work. He devoted it mainly to 
the Scriptures. Prayer also held a great 
place with him. He was much in supplica- 
tion, and records many answers. But he 
did not as a rule spend much time in secret 
prayer. Protracted seasons of agonizing 
petition did not seem called for in his case. 
The very atmosphere in which he lived 
was one of constant communion with God. 
It was perfectly easy for him to stop 
wherever he was and talk with his Father 
as naturally as with a friend. He often 
did it as he was driving in the country. 

He was at times homesick for heaven, 
even when a young man entering into 
Rutherford's burning words. As years in- 
creased the longing was greatly intensified. 
His departure (December 22, 1899) was 
very triumphant. ''Earth recedes, heaven 
opens before me. It is beautiful. I have 
been beyond the gates of death, and to the 
very portals of heaven. If this is death, 
108 



DWIGHT L. MOODY 

it is sweet. There is no valley here. God 
is calling me, and I must go.'' These were 
some of his latest words. The tombstone 
on Round Top, at Northfield, where his 
body lies, has simply this inscription, so 
strongly significant, ''He that doeth the 
will of God abideth forever/' 



109 



George Mueller 

IN marked contrast with nearly all others 
who have reached high eminence in re- 
hgious things, Mueller's youth was sinful 
in the extreme. Until he was twenty he 
wasted his years in profligacy and wicked- 
ness of many kinds, being a liar, a thief, 
a swindler, a drunkard, a companion of 
convicted felons, himself in a felon's cell, 
a hardened transgressor. He had no proper 
parental training, but he had a good edu- 
cation, being a university student at Halle, 
in preparation for the ministry, though 
utterly godless and fearfully ignorant of 
divine things. 

The turning-point in his career came 
one Saturday evening in November, 1825. 
Up to that time he had never heard one 
gospel sermon, nor did he have a copy of 
the Bible in his possession. He went with 
a friend to an evening meeting in a private 
house, and for the first time saw somebody 
on his knees praying. Most mysteriously 
110 



GEORGE MUELLER 

this was for him the parting of the ways. 
He began to search the Scriptures, and a 
new peace came into his heart. And in 
this uneventful way there began a career 
of which prayer for direct guidance in 
every crisis, great or small, was to be the 
main characteristic — believing prayer and 
faithful Scripture searching. 

As to the Bible, although up to this 
time he had never heard one chapter of 
it, he soon learned the lesson of its primary 
importance. In a few years he acquired a 
genuine relish for the Word, and gave 
himself increasingly, as long as he lived, 
to its study. During the last twenty years 
of his life he read it carefully through four 
or five times annually, with a growing sense 
of his own rapid advancement in the 
knowledge of God thereby. He read the 
Bible from end to end in all nearly two 
hundred times. In his ninety-second year 
he said to a friend that for every page of 
any other reading he had read ten of the 
Bible. No secret lies nearer to the root 
of Mueller's success than this devout med- 
itation and continual reflection upon the 
Scripture. He did not make the fatal mis- 
take so common with most Christians — 
111 



RELIGIOUS EXPERIENXE 

he did not forget that the highest prepara- 
tion for our work is the preparation of our 
souls, and that for this we must take time 
to be alone with His Word and His Spirit, 
that we may truly meet Him and under- 
stand His will. 

Closely connected with this was his 
power in prayer. He heard God say to 
him, as to Elijah, first, '*Go hide thyself;" 
then, "Go show thyself." He was never 
too busy to pray. He used to say to 
brethren who had "too much to do" to 
spend proper time with God, that four 
hours of work for which one of prayer pre- 
pares is better than five hours of work with 
the pra>ing left out. His life can in no 
way be understood except on the basis of 
his daily and frequent communion with 
God. He was unwearied in supplications 
and intercessions; and in every crisis the 
prayer of faith was his one resort. He 
first satisfied himself that he was in the 
way of duty; then he fixed his mind upon 
the unchanging word of promise; then, in 
the boldness of a suppliant who comes to 
the throne of grace in the name of Jesus 
Christ and pleads the assurance of the 
Immutable Promiser, he presented every- 
112 



GEORGE MUELLER 

petition. No delay discouraged him. In 
fifty thousand cases Mr. Mueller calculated 
that he could trace distinct answers to 
definite prayers; and in multitudes of in- 
stances in which God's care was not defi- 
nitely traced, it was day by day like an 
encompassing but invisible presence or at- 
mosphere of life and strength. 

To one who asked him the secret of his 
service, he said: ^' There was a day when 
I died, utterly died'' — and as he spoke he 
bent lower and lower until he almost 
touched the floor — ''died to George 
Mueller, his opinions, preferences, tastes, 
and will; died to the world, its approval or 
censure ; died to the approval or blame even 
of my brethren and friends ; and since then 
I have studied only to show myself ap- 
proved unto God.'' Just when this most 
significant death took place we find no 
account, but it is certain that from very 
nearly the beginning of his religious life 
he was unreservedly given up to God, ac- 
cording to the measure of his light, and as 
the light, in response to his eager search- 
ing, constantly increased, he went very 
steadily forward. His loyalty to duty 
seemed to be ever complete. It was 
8 113 



RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 

enough for him to know that a certain 
course, however distasteful to the flesh, 
was pointed out by the Spirit, and there 
was no hesitation in following it. His eye 
was single, his purpose simple. He laid 
up nothing for old age; he spent nothing 
on himself except what the barest necessi- 
ties demanded. He exercised the utmost 
frugality and economy for Christ's sake, 
keeping himself poor that he might make 
many rich. In this way, out of money 
given him strictly for his own private use, 
he distributed $407,450; this in addition 
to the $7,500,000, which came to him 
solely in answer to prayer for the various 
institutions which God carried on through 
him. He had practically nothing in hand 
when he died. 

When his wife, whom he most tenderly 
loved, passed away, he showed the same 
implicit faith in the Father's unfailing wis- 
dom and love that had sustained him under 
other trying circumstances. Within a few 
hours after her departure he went to the 
prayer-meeting to mingle his prayers and 
praises, as usual, with those of his brethren. 
He asked them to join with him in hearty 
thanksgiving to the precious Lord for His 
114 



GEORGE MUELLER 

loving-kindness in having taken his be- 
loved wife out of her pain and suffering 
into His own presence. He said: '^As I 
rejoice in everything that is for her happi- 
ness, so I now rejoice as I realize how far 
happier she is in beholding her Lord whom 
she loves so well, than in any joy she has 
known, or could know, here." He con- 
ducted the funeral service, both at the 
chapel and at the cemetery, preaching the 
sermon from the text, '^Thou art good, and 
doest good.'' It was the supernatural 
serenity of his peace in the presence of 
such a bereavement that led his attending 
physician to say to a friend: ^*I have 
never before seen so unhuman a man.'* 
He lived in such habitual communion with 
the unseen world and walked in such un- 
interrupted fellowship with the unseen 
God that the exchange of worlds became 
too real for him to mourn for those who 
had made it or to murmur at all at the 
hand of Infinite Love. 

He summed up his long history of 
blessing in these two statements: First, 
that the Lord was pleased to give him far 
beyond all he at first expected to accom- 
plish or receive; secondly, that he was fully 
115 



RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 

persuaded that all he had seen and known 
would not equal the thousandth part of 
what he should see and know when the 
Lord should come. He felt that the faith 
of God's children needs strengthening, and 
that it was his special business in life to 
glorify God as One who helps those who 
trust in Him, to exemplify how much may 
be accomplished by prayer, and to show 
that there is a present prayer-hearing God 
whom it is perfectly safe to trust, and with 
whom we may daily walk. He cultivated 
faith. He used to say to his helpers: 
^^ Never let enter your minds a shadow of 
doubt as to the love of the Father's heart 
or the power of the Father's arm." Loyal 
trust in God raised him above circum- 
stances and appearances. It gave steadfast- 
ness to his whole character, and brought 
his daily walk very near to the gates of 
heaven. His biographer says: ''Loyalty 
to truth, the obedience of faith, the sac- 
rifice of love — these form the threefold key 
which unlocks to us all the closed chambers 
of his Hfe." He dealt directly with God in 
all; he recognized but one agent, men 
being only instrumentalities. He knew no 
116 



GEORGE MUELLER 

disappointment or despondency, for he 
leaned always upon the living God, who 
never fails. His one business being to 
please the Lord, he found all his circum- 
stances becoming his servants. 

He was born in Prussia, September 27, 
1805; he fell asleep in Jesus at Bristol, 
England, March 10, 1898, in his ninety- 
third year. A few months before he said: 
**I have been able every day and all the 
day to work, and that with ease, as sev- 
enty years since.'* He felt no weakness or 
weariness in his work until the very last 
night of his earthly sojourn. He himself 
attributed his vigor largely to the love he 
felt for the Scriptures and the constantly 
recuperative power they exercised upon 
his whole being, and to that happiness he 
felt in God and his work which relieved 
him of all anxiety and needless wear and 
tear in his labors. He passed away very 
quietly in the night from heart failure. 
He belonged to the whole Church and the 
whole world, and the whole race of man 
sustained a great loss when he left them. 
As Wesley's life spanned the eighteenth 
century, Mueller's spanned the nineteenth. 
117 



RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 

The two men, while very unlike in many of 
their opinions, were marvelously similar in 
their spirit and labors. Both of them ex- 
hort us as with trumpet tongue to be in 
earnest, to v/alk by faith, and to live for 
eternity. 



118 



Catherine Booth 

MRS. BOOTH, mother of the Salvation 
Army, wife of William Booth, co- 
founder with him of this great evangelistic 
enterprise, must be accounted one of the 
very foremost Christian workers of the nine- 
teenth century. Her zeal kept ever at the 
boihng point; her judgment was rarely at 
fault; her earnest longings to be just like 
the Master were constant; her sympathy 
with the suffering, struggling masses of 
humanity was intense. In both writing 
and speaking she greatly excelled, as well 
as in planning and laboring. Her pulpit 
power was phenomenal. The most spacious 
halls in Great Britain were crowded to 
repletion with eager thousands whenever 
she was announced. Few have been as 
useful. Few have been loved as much. It 
is well, then, to inquire into the religious 
experience of this truly wonderful woman. 
She was pre-eminently a woman of action, 
never getting time to keep a diary, more 
intent on making history than recording 
119 



RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 

it, perpetually overwhelmed with cares and 
toils beyond her strength, mother of eight 
children, as well as of the Army, writing 
few letters that have been preserved, and 
in them scarcely ever speaking of herself. 
So the materials for tracing her growth in 
grace are rather scanty. 

Born of wise and pious parents, January 
17, 1829 (dying October 4, 1890), her 
father an earnest preacher, her mother a 
most careful, conscientious woman, she 
had a magnificent start. It is stated that 
she had read the Bible through eight times 
before she was twelve years old. But in 
spite of an unsullied, closely guarded, beau- 
tifully developed childhood, when she 
reached the age of sixteen she sought to be 
converted. That is, although conscious of 
having given herself up fully to God from 
her earliest years, and often realizing deep 
enjoyment in prayer, as well as keen sat- 
isfaction with the means of grace, she had 
a feeling that she had not passed through 
the regular steps essential to constitute 
her a child of God. She had not definitely 
repented, claimed the promises, and re- 
ceived the witness of the Spirit. She was 
afraid of being deceived, or of lacking 
120 



CATHERINE BOOTH 

something necessary to the full favor di- 
vine. She went through much agony on 
the subject — agony which to us seems 
needless, but to her, no doubt, was very 
real — until the full assurance of salvation 
was given her, and her sorrow was turned 
into abundance of joy. She then joined 
the Wesleyan Church and went on very 
happily, reading the Bible through twice 
in sixteen months, reading also Carvosso's 
Life and other such books, entering into 
fresh covenants with the Lord, and seek- 
ing after perfect holiness of heart. 

But it was not till 1861, when she was 
thirty-two years old, that her ardent soul, 
ever on the stretch for fuller conformity 
to the Divine will, began to struggle defi- 
nitely for the specific attainment of some- 
thing more. Her mind seemed to work 
much the same in this as in the previous 
experience. She wanted to go through the 
regular steps and feel that nothing which 
promised any sort of profit had been 
omitted or left uncertain. So she had a 
fierce conflict for deeper consecration, a 
conflict indescribable, '*far worse than 
death,'' she calls it, that she might be cer- 
tain everything was on the altar and Christ 
121 



RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 

was all. Bound for a while by the bars of 
unbelief, she was able, after a little, to 
burst them as fuller light came and she 
emerged into freedom and victory. Vari- 
ous Scriptures were blessed to her. Finally 
responding to the declaration, ''Now are 
ye clean through the word which I have 
spoken unto you/' her faith took hold w^ith 
more and more firmness, and she says, 
''From that moment I have dared to 
reckon myself dead indeed unto sin and 
alive unto God, through Jesus Christ my 
Lord.'* Not much rapturous joy came, but 
perfect peace w^as given, and she entered 
into a rest which remained. Writing of it 
a little later, she says: "When I made the 
surrender I did it whole-heartedly, and 
ever since I have been like another being.*' 
Another letter, written in 1863, gives fur- 
ther indication of what took place during 
four long years: "Whenever I used to try 
to appropriate the promises and get nearer 
to God, it was always suggested to my 
mind, 'But you are not willing to give 
your husband up to be an evangelist.* 
Before I could get right I had to settle 
that controversy by saying, 'Lord, if it 
122 



CATHERINE BOOTH 

kills me, I will do it/ And as soon as I 
had done this I entered into rest. I see 
more than ever that the religion that is 
pleasing to God consists in doing and en- 
during His will, rather than in good senti- 
ments and feelings/' 

How was it in after years? Did the 
blessing abide? In the main it did. She 
was a lifelong martyr to many illnesses of 
a very painful character. Nothing but 
the most heroic, indomitable determina- 
tion, an iron will triumphing over the body, 
carried her through the public and private 
engagements which were of so much con- 
sequence to the world. The state of her 
nerves led to rather frequent seasons of 
depression, against which she fought val- 
iantly. The trials connected with the ever- 
expanding enormous work were intense 
and immense. She writes: ^*We are 
compassed with difficulties on every side. 
Still there is so much for which to praise 
God that I ought never to look at these 
troubles. I feel about them just as I do 
about my health when I pray about it. I 
meet with *Ye know not what ye ask.* I 
have such a sense of the wisdom and benev- 
123 



RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 

olence of God underlying every other feeling 
that I dare not go beyond * Nevertheless, 
not my will but Thine be done.* *' 

She suffered greatly from her keen 
sympathy with the sinning and sorrowing. 
She had an agony for souls that wore her 
out. More than once she writes: '*The 
obtuseness, the indifference of professed 
Christians is the greatest trial of my life. 
We have to do the best we can with the 
material we have, as the poor Lord has to 
do with us all." 

She made no claim to be leading a 
perfect life. Who can when there is entire 
honesty? She writes at various times: 
''O, I continually come short. I want 
Madame Guyon's faith and self-renuncia- 
tion. Pray for me. I do so deeply deplore 
my own failure, compared with what my 
life might have been, that I feel as though 
I could die to save any of you children 
from making a mistake. I see as I never 
saw before that all God wants of us, In 
order to fill us with the Spirit and make us 
flames of fire, Is that we should be honest 
and whole-hearted with Himself, and I 
want you to begin life by being so. I wish 
I had always trusted and never been afraid. 
124 



CATHERINE BOOTH 

If we could see the why and the where- 
fore there would be no room for faith, for 
then we should walk by sight. It is a 
great lesson, but it is the lesson of the 
Divine life. O may the Lord help you to 
master it better than your mother has 
done. O for a faith that quails not before 
any of the whys of feeling, of reason, or 
of the devil; but that goes calmly on 
through the darkest Calvaries unmoved. 
Pray for me sometimes. '* 

She faced death unflinchingly, although 
amid severe pain, for more than two years. 
To a deputation of the Army which visited 
her, as she drew near to the end, she said: 
'4 thank God that notwithstanding all the 
defects and imperfections, I see in my life 
and work as I look back upon them from 
this bed, I can say that by His grace I 
have ever kept the interests of His King- 
dom first, and have never withheld any- 
thing He required of me in order to help 
forward the salvation of the world.'' She 
also said from her dying bed: **One of 
the hardest lessons that I have had to 
learn in my career, and one that I think I 
have been learning more effectually the 
last few years, is to discern between faith 
125 



RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 

and realization. They are entirely distinct 
the one from the other, and if I have had 
to conquer all my life by naked faith, bring- 
ing afterwards perhaps very blessed reali- 
zations, I can only expect that it shall be 
the same now. Tell the officers that the 
only consolation for a Salvationist on his 
dying bed is to feel that he has been a soul- 
winner. And tell them further that after 
all my labors I feel I come far short of the 
prize of my high calling. Beseech them to 
redeem their time, for we can do but little 
at our best. Thank God, I have been a 
denouncer of iniquity. That is what is 
wanted in this world to-day — denouncers 
of iniquity.'* 

She was a mighty warrior for the truth, 
and a marvelous winner of souls. She 
hated shams, make-believes, and hypoc- 
risies. Love controlled her wholly. She 
greatly resembled Jesus. Self was put last 
or lost to view; the Kingdom of God was 
ever first. She was a succorer of many, an 
inspiration to great multitudes. Among 
the chosen few who follow the Lord fully 
and devote all their powers to saving their 
fellows, she will ever take high rank. 
126 



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